tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-164332782015-07-27T12:43:40.111-04:00Panels and Pixels"You put your video games in my comics!" "No, you put your comics in my video games!"Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.comBlogger469125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-14186061451691952572009-03-12T12:16:00.015-04:002009-03-12T13:45:12.771-04:00An interview with Ed BrubakerBelow is an interview I did with writer <a href="http://www.edbrubaker.com/">Ed Brubaker</a> a few months ago when his new series <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incognito_%28comics%29"><span style="font-style: italic;">Incognito </span></a>debuted. Originally this was going to run as part of my column but, well, que sera sera. Here's the full interview:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SblHrczsEMI/AAAAAAAABAA/sJOtdmIV7Rw/s1600-h/incognitocvr.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 247px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SblHrczsEMI/AAAAAAAABAA/sJOtdmIV7Rw/s320/incognitocvr.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5312356047253147842" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />Q: So tell me about <span style="font-style: italic;">Incognito</span>. </span><br /><br />A: <span style="font-style: italic;">Incognito </span>is an idea I’ve been mulling over since we were wrapping up <span style="font-style: italic;">Sleeper</span>. I often try to think of the inverse of an idea to see what would be interesting — if this idea is interesting to explore in one direction would it be interesting to explore it in the other? Look at a story like <span style="font-style: italic;">The Shield,</span> where you’ve got a corrupt cop who’s trying to save his soul. What if you flip that to the other side where it’s a mobster instead of a cop? I think of things like that sometimes and try to see if there’s a story in there.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Sleeper’s</span> about a good person who for his government goes undercover as a bad guy and slowly loses whatever moral compass he had and starts to realize that the bad guys and the good guys aren’t that different in the ways that they act. And maybe doing bad things for the right reason is just as bad as doing bad things for the wrong reason. There’s a lot of moral gray areas to explore there, so I was thinking "What if you did the opposite, what if there was a bad person somehow forced into a situation where they actually either had to or ended up doing good things, but they’re someone who has no moral compass, who looks down at humanity and ends up somehow through circumstance being forced to live among them and develop sympathy for them perhaps?"<br /><br />That’s where <span style="font-style: italic;">Incognito </span>grew out of, trying to figure out, is there a story in that character exploration? Then I started thinking of it in terms of a noir story and suddenly I was "Oh, what if it’s a super villain living in witness protection," and everything started to come together from there. All my love of old pulp characters like Doc Savage and the Shadow started to come out. The idea of trying to do a story that’s sort of a mixture between the modern superhero and a '50s noir story really started to appeal to me. I started thinking “What if the pulps had never stopped? What if instead of crime stories and noir, the crime pulp stuff was mashed in together with Doc Savage and the Shadow and Operator Number Five?” What if they made noir-esque stories with these characters? Everything started building from that.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: Tell me a little bit about the main character and how you see him. He comes across as not the most likable character, and that’s always a little tricky because you want the audience to have sympathy for him. </span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SblH4vPAX6I/AAAAAAAABAI/-9fvBjDE8Jk/s1600-h/INCOGNITO_001006.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 130px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SblH4vPAX6I/AAAAAAAABAI/-9fvBjDE8Jk/s200/INCOGNITO_001006.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5312356275537862562" border="0" /></a><br />A: He’s definitely an anti-hero. That’s the story. It’s the journey of a bad guy. He’s an Eastwood type. It’s that kind of character, Eastwood in <span style="font-style: italic;">Fistful of Dollars</span> or somebody who is clearly an outlaw. And yet we’ll start to see there’s something about this person. I think by the end of the first issue you get an idea that this guy isn’t just this anti-hero who looks down on everybody and feels trapped by this thing. You see some of the wounds this guy carries and how he became who he is. He becomes a more human character even by the end of the first issue, even though he does retain that hardened edge of a guy who was raised on the wrong side. I guess if you’re raised on it, it doesn’t feel like the wrong side.<br /><br />Zach and his brother Xander were raised -- they’re twin brothers -- and they were taken from a state adoption home and have no memory of it. They’re earliest memories are of being experimented on by this mad scientist guy who was in this evil organization known as the Black Death. They were taking orphan kids and doing science experiments on them to try to turn them into super villains, basically. He was a twin and he and his twin brother were major enforcers for this evil organization and at some point about three or four years ago something happened to his brother and he ended up turning on the people he worked for. Now he’s living in witness protection, but everybody thinks he’s dead. And he’s on drugs that make him a normal person. They shut down all of the enhancements that he’s been given.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: That sounds a lot like some of the characters and themes you’ve been exploring in your other books like <span style="font-style: italic;">Criminal</span>. Certainly the idea of family, like the Lawless brothers in <span style="font-style: italic;">Criminal </span>and even the Cap/Bucky relationship in Captain America. </span><br /><br />A: There’s some truth to that. We all have a few themes we explore over and over again as writers, whether you consciously know it or not.<br /><br />One of the main things in this for me came out as an accident in that it occurred to me that the main character was a twin when I was thinking about the themes of the book, when I was fleshing out the ideas of the book early on. The word <span style="font-style: italic;">Incognito </span>has so many different meanings. You’re doing a story about people who put on costumes and run around but doing it in a sort of noir way -- well, all good noir is at heart character studies with a plot taking place around them. You really build your whole story from the character.<br /><br />So I thought “Who is this character” and it occurred to me that a lot of what the story is about is a guy who doesn’t exactly know what his identity is. He’s living a lie. The person that he truly is taking drugs and is living in this suburban Anytown, USA, kind of place working an office job and pretending to be someone he isn’t. He’s completely incognito and yet he puts on a mask and feels like this is who he is. Or maybe it isn’t. There’s so much about identity.<br /><br />And it occurred to me “why does this guy go into witness protection” and then suddenly the whole twin thing came up. Identical twins have so much of their identity sometimes wrapped up in their twin. A lot of time they’re really close friends and have mental connections and things like that. So the idea of a twin separated from his brother and everyone thinks he’s dead and he’s living this new life for the first time on his own, but everything about it is a lie. So it really gets to the heart of what the story’s about in a lot of ways.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: It’s interesting because your description also fits Clark Kent. </span><br /><br />A: Does it though? He was raised to be Clark Kent. Going into witness protection is a lot different. (laughter)<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SblIEa9d1TI/AAAAAAAABAY/VPHRrOEBZG0/s1600-h/INCOGNITO_001008.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 130px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SblIEa9d1TI/AAAAAAAABAY/VPHRrOEBZG0/s200/INCOGNITO_001008.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5312356476254016818" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: That’s true, but —</span><br /><br />A: "As a baby, Superman killed many, many people, but he was able to testify against Kryptonians and moved to witness protection in Kansas to be raised by an elderly family."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: That’s my recollection of the story.</span><br /><br />A: That’s actually a pretty good story. If I ever get my hands on Superman ...<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: One of those Elseworlds tales —</span><br /><br />A: Even as a baby he had full adult intelligence. That’s a creepy story though. I like that.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: But it does sound like you’re playing off the kind of wish fulfillment that a lot of superheroes provide. Especially in that initial 2-page preview, where the lead is saying “I’m better than all the other people I’m surrounded by.”</span><br /><br />A: Yeah, it is kind of the flip side of Superman/Clark Kent sitting there and thinking “nobody knows.” This is him sitting there and thinking “Nobody knows I could kill all of you and not care.”<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: Are you consciously going to be playing off of the traditional superhero tropes in that aspect?</span><br /><br />A: I don’t think so. I never consciously set out to do a parody of anything.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: I didn’t necessarily mean a parody —</span><br /><br />A: No, I know what you meant. But I don’t think I’m consciously trying to reference any other superhero comics at least. There’s little nods here and there to the pulps because when you do a story like this and you’re creating the whole thing from the ground up, you have to do a little bit of world-building. My world-building was creating these pulp-hero characters from the '30s and '40s and they’re not really important to the story at all, they’re just background elements to the world. You may not ever see them in the same way there’s tons of elements in <span style="font-style: italic;">Criminal </span>that nobody ever actually sees. We referenced Sebastian Hyde a number of times before anyone actually saw him.<br /><br />With <span style="font-style: italic;">Sleeper </span>we did that thing where the characters all told their secret origins in third person which was a little play on the origin stories of characters and a little play on the way origin stories used to be told. I don’t think that’s what I’m doing. Who knows? It’s hard to tell when you’re in the midst of it. I’m deep into writing this project now. All I can think of is the character and the shit he’s getting into. Obviously the point of the thing is to explore the gray area between good and evil from the other point of view. We always see that side of it, the good person doing bad things and how that affects you; on some level this is approaching that.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: You talk about taking part of things from the pulps and noir and superhero comics. What things are you consciously taking? Are there any genre tropes you’re taking and how do you roll them up and keep them from bumping into each other, because they’re different genres, or at least perceived as such.</span><br /><br />A: It’s kind of apocalyptic noir in this weird way. Noir isn’t really a genre — People think of it as a genre, but the people who think of it as that, when they start to tell you what movies that would fit into that don’t realize how elastic that actually is.<br /><br />A noir story, if there are rules to it, the main rule seems to be whoever your main character is, nothing good is going to happen to him. (laughs) And at the end of the story he may be dead. If he’s narrating, he may be narrating on his deathbed. It’s more of the way a story is told as opposed to what the story is. Many things that a lot of people consider noir could also be considered straight crime stories. A lot of people consider the Parker novels to be noir, but I just think of them as heist novels. Parker tends to live through all of them and there isn’t a lot of tragedy involved in that process.<br /><br />I think instinctively I’ve always brought that air of tragic noir element to whatever I'm doing. I’m trying to subvert some of the principles of that genre a little bit by doing this. It’s kind of an experiment to take pulp and make up sort of an evolution of where these pulp styled characters would have gone and how they would have affected a world of also try to tell it through this really character-driven noir story. So it is a little bit of an experiment, but I really like the elements of something like Doc Savage; I love these apocalyptic literature of pulp fiction with these characters who were just sort of weird, crazy, vicious characters who were planning to destroy the world, and you had a guy like Doc Savage who would take out whole organizations and whoever would survive they would take them back to their institute and carve out pieces of their brain so they wouldn’t be bad guys anymore.<br /><br />There was weird stuff going on in those pulp stories that comics sort of evolved from. As comics started being more and more for kids a lot of that eccentric bizarre early atomic-age stuff just fell by the waste side. That’s the kind of stuff I’m tapping into a little bit with <span style="font-style: italic;">Incognito</span>. Just using that hard, crazy science edge to some of this world. Not as if I’m the first person by any means to explore the pulp roots of what superhero comics grew out of. Alan Moore started a whole line of stuff. But they weren’t the first either. We wouldn’t even have Batman if not for the Shadow.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: I talked to you back when <span style="font-style: italic;">Criminal </span>first came out and I remember you saying how with <span style="font-style: italic;">Sleeper</span>, because it was aimed at more traditional comic book readers, you were able to be a lot more experimental in your layouts and design. And with <span style="font-style: italic;">Criminal </span>you wanted it to be very basic so that anyone could pick it up. What about with <span style="font-style: italic;">Incognito</span>?</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SblIELFNKYI/AAAAAAAABAQ/cXYE0qoRrlo/s1600-h/INCOGNITO_001009.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 130px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SblIELFNKYI/AAAAAAAABAQ/cXYE0qoRrlo/s200/INCOGNITO_001009.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5312356471991511426" border="0" /></a><br /><br />A: I think it’s mostly pretty straightforward. With every project it seems like Sean starts to experiment a little bit with the way he tells a story or structures a page. With this one, my favorite art from him, maybe ever, is the stuff for <span style="font-style: italic;">Incognito </span>because I love the way he’s doing these no-panel borders, using the gutter space as negative space and hard clean balloons for the word balloons. Everything’s very mechanical except for the stuff that’s hand drawn by him.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Sleeper </span>— he’ll probably do a story like that again, with that kind of experimental storytelling, but I’ve seen what he’s doing now with these odd panels that have these full bleeds. He’s doing this thing where he’ll make certain panels pop so they’ll bleed to the edge of the page.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: Of course, <span style="font-style: italic;">Criminal </span>has changed. Both of you have gotten a little more experimental.</span><br /><br />A: Yeah, but we’re still basically sticking to a three-tier grid. I can’t remember who said it, but if you can’t tell a story on a three tier grid you can’t tell a story. The first advice I remember reading in a book about experimental layout when everybody was trying to do weird angle panels and imitate Neal Adams with all of his crazy storytelling stuff he did and somebody pointed out that before Neal Adams ever tried that he made sure he could tell a story in 6-9 panels per page. Learn the rules before you break them.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: Not to take away from any of the other artists you’ve collaborated with, but this is the third book you and Phillips have worked on and you seem to click together well. What do you think it is that allows you to work together so well?</span><br /><br />A: I don’t know. We’re just on the same page about the kind of comics we want to do. I really feel like a lot of what I do pacing wise really fits most of my scripts if you look at any of them have as much description of facial expression and what the character is feeling as it does with "in the background there’s this and this." All my stuff wouldn’t wouldn’t work at all if I didn’t have artists that can really generate empathy from the readers for the characters. Sean just does that really well. We love a lot of the same comics and aspire to do things on the same levels as the books we really dug. A lot of times we’re playing to each other. I feel like I’m writing this stuff to some degree for Sean because he’s the first person that reads anything I write for anything I own.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Is this going to be an open-ended story? Do you have a definitive end in mind? Or could this go on?</span><br /><br />A: It’ll depend. I know the end of this story, I’ve got the last scene written already. It came to me early on. It’s definitely left in such a way that if someone were to want to, we could revisit this character or other characters in this world, depending on if I end up sticking with that scene.The plan right now is once we finish this to go back and do more <span style="font-style: italic;">Criminal</span>. We’re having a lot of fun. With <span style="font-style: italic;">Criminal </span>especially built up a pretty loyal, sizable audience of people who are clearly following us over to <span style="font-style: italic;">Incognito</span>. And hopefully we’ll pick up some more from <span style="font-style: italic;">Incognito</span>. As long as people keep buying comics by us in enough quantities that we can afford to keep doing it, Sean and I will put out as many of them a year as we can.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: I was going to ask you how <span style="font-style: italic;">Criminal </span>was doing.</span><br /><br />A: It’s doing really well actually. We’re one of the more stable books on the market apparently. We’ve been doing about 18,000 an issue. That’s advance orders. I think we’re doing close to 19,000 on final sales. That’s better than most books like that. I always want to reach more people and I feel like it’s still under-performing cause I still hear from people all the time whose stores buy three copies and sell out the first day so I always know they could be selling at least a few more. It’s better than almost everything Vertigo publishes.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: I was going to say.</span><br /><br />A: Yeah, other than <span style="font-style: italic;">Fables</span>. From my side, once we relaunched with the new format and I think after issue two, the orders for issue three actually went up and in issue four the orders were higher than one even. And we’ve just stayed at that level. One issue I think was 30 copies less. It’s insane to have a book where the numbers are the same every month.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: What about the trades?</span><br /><br />A: They’re doing really well too. We’ve sent the first one back for a second printing and we’re pretty close to selling out the first print run of the second trade. I’m just waiting to get some statements. but we’re moving really good numbers, and mostly through comic stores. We’re not really doing huge bookstore push because I handle all that stuff myself. Also we’re in print in five or six other countries and our French publisher has gone back to print with the first book. We’re coming out all over the world with this stuff. The more books come out the more they seem to feed each other. Every day I hear from more and more people who are just getting turned onto it, so it just seems kind of crazy, for two years and only 17 issues.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: How many issues is <span style="font-style: italic;">Incognito</span>?</span><br /><br />A: Five issues and then we’re back to <span style="font-style: italic;">Criminal</span>. We’re doing the next Lawless story after that. <span style="font-style: italic;">Incognito’s</span> just five issues. We’ll probably do more of it. We’ll see how we like doing it the further in we get. So far I like it, which is surprising, because after <span style="font-style: italic;">Sleeper </span>I thought "Let’s just do crime stories and not deal with any of the super-powered stuff at all." But it’s a lot of fun to be back doing something like this with Sean where we get to flex some different muscles and have some fun within that genre. I like working in comics you can do a story like that and a large part of your audience goes into it knowing what a super villain is.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: Working for someone like Marvel or DC you’re under these creative restrictions as far as what you can or can’t do with the character. In your case I”m not sure that’s true, because they always say they can’t kill the character and you did.</span><br /><br />A: I’ve gotten really lucky with getting away with murder, literally, on books but also I haven’t slammed up against a lot of restrictions. Things you can or can’t say I get a lot, in terms of from month to month it seems to change. There’s never any hard or fast rule. You can say "damn" in a book but you can’t say "damn"19 times on a page. Weird things like that.<br /><br />I don’t think I could do the work for hire stuff if I wasn’t also doing original work. I think they feed each other at this point for me. I went a few years only doing work for hire stuff when I first started out at Marvel before <span style="font-style: italic;">Criminal</span>. It just seemed like I was going to lose my mind if I didn’t start doing some work that I actually had a stake in and felt like was important to me. I have a big stake in <span style="font-style: italic;">Captain America</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Daredevil</span>. They are important to me but it’s a whole different thing when you create all of it from start to finish. You own it and it’s your universe. It’s not everybody else’s too.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: You don’t have to worry about tying it into </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Civil War</span><span style="font-weight: bold;">.</span><br /><br />A: But even that stuff, if you take those jobs at Marvel, you can’t complain when somebody says "Oh we want you to tie into such and such." I’ve been really lucky. People think that happens more than it actually does. I have editors who say "Hey our book needs a boost, tie it into such and such a thing." I’ve been on that end at DC. I don’t think I’ve ever been on that end at Marvel but I’m sure there are people who have been.<br /><br />You’re trying to tell the best story with someone else’s character and I lie to myself and make myself believe I own the Captain America part of the Marvel Universe other than Brian being able to use him in <span style="font-style: italic;">Avengers</span>. But during <span style="font-style: italic;">Civil War</span> Cap was in every third book and usually getting beaten up by the main characters. He probably got captured like nine times during Civil War. I’m the only one who didn’t have him get captured.<br /><br />You lie to yourself and tell yourself it’s your character while you’re writing it. You have to otherwise you’re not going to do a good job and give the readers their money’s worth. which is what your job is to do. Make people want to keep reading these characters. That’s a great fucking job. It beats flipping burgers, which I’ve done. It beats any job I’ve ever had because it’s still creatively fulfilling. But doing your own stuff is even more fulfilling. (laughs)<br /><br />I like both. I love <span style="font-style: italic;">Captain America</span>. Ever since I was a little kid I’ve had these ideas that I would grow up and work on <span style="font-style: italic;">Captain America</span>. I probably went a good decade or so without ever thinking about it, but the moment I got that phone call from Brian saying "Hey is there anything you want to do? I know you’re exclusive is ending soon," and Joe called me the next day to offer me <span style="font-style: italic;">Captain America</span>. There was no way I was saying no. It’s pretty cool. It’s the same way I would work on Doc Savage or the Shadow if Marvel had them. I find if I go a full month without writing something that I’m doing — all the stuff is intended to be read and enjoyed by people but <span style="font-style: italic;">Incognito </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">Criminal, </span>as long as I’m doing something that Sean wants to draw and that I’m really into. <span style="font-style: italic;">Bad Night</span> is one of the best things I think I’ve ever written.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: I have to say, I thought that last issue was supurb.</span><br /><br />A: Thanks. I was trying to do one of those James M. Cain style things. Jason Star did a book called <span style="font-style: italic;">Twisted City</span> that has the best last scene in a crime story that totally changed everything about the main character in his last moment. I didn’t go for that.<br /><br />It’s interesting. I do read the odd review and I noticed until issue four’s reviews, almost all people online reviewers were thinking that Jake was having conversations with the Frank Kafka character throughout the whole story. If you read it, you can see that’s not actually happening at all. In the first three parts of the story, up until the very last panel of part three, he never acknowledges Frank’s presence at all. As a reader you can think he’s just imagining what his comic book character would say or do because he doesn’t interact with him. It’s almost like it’s a voice inside of his head, which is what you’re supposed to think. And then you realize it is a real voice inside his head.<br /><br />That was one of my favorite things I’ve ever worked on and one of the hardest things to write too. There’s not a single scene in there that isn’t important to the big conclusion. Even the first line of narration about the house burning down across the street comes back around. Everything comes back around. I feel really lucky to have a platform to do stories like that. The minute that sales started feeling stable, that sense of “Oh this is going to go away someday,” went away. I started to feel like we have a fan base that is actually following what we’re doing. I was always worried during the first 10 issues cause sales would fluctuate where it would seem like we were doing really good and then the next issue orders would be down 2,000. I knew we were being underordered. I didn’t think it was a bunch of "trade waiters" cause I kept hearing from people who could find part five of a five part story. I think we stabilized 3,000 higher than we’d been selling on the last four issues of the previous run. I can’t believe the same stores are ordering the exact same number every time. But maybe.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: I suppose in these times retailers can’t afford to take chances on extra copies of anything.</span><br /><br />A: That’s why I’m really thrilled <span style="font-style: italic;">Incognito </span>did as well as it did. It didn’t do as well as I initially thought when we first announced it and everyone flipped out. But that was a week before the economy started to tank completely. Or at least publicly tank. Bad time to be launching a new book. I keep reminding people not to flip out too much about the whole economy thing because: a) that will just make it worse and b) even during the Great Depression 25 percent of the country was still working. Don’t automatically assume you’re going to be in the other 25 percent.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: Right. It’s just in the newspaper industry. </span><br /><br />A: (laughs) Right. You guys need to get a bailout together. The problem is those stupid news media conglomerates that seem to think you’re supposed to make a profit on journalism. Journalism is supposed to be a break even thing at best.Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-32843681325937841022009-02-26T17:18:00.002-05:002009-02-26T17:21:37.769-05:00Graphic Lit: Black Jack<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SacV2leo9LI/AAAAAAAAA_4/BuIcAd63WLU/s1600-h/BOOKS_Roundup_.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 239px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SacV2leo9LI/AAAAAAAAA_4/BuIcAd63WLU/s320/BOOKS_Roundup_.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5307234713397163186" border="0" /></a><br /><br />How phenomenal is the mysterious, rogue surgeon known as Black Jack?<br /><br />He can perform arm transplants! Heart transplants! Even brain transplants!<br /><br />He’s a whiz at cosmetic surgery, capable of turning the most ugly mug in the world into a Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie look-alike.<br /><br />He can even operate on himself! In the middle of the Australian outback! While fending off wild dingoes!<br /><br />I’ve written about creator Osamu Tezuka at length before. Suffice it to say he remains one of the most significant cartoonists ever, having almost single-handedly birthed the manga industry since coming to the fore in 1947 (he passed away in 1989).<br /><br />And “Black Jack” is one of his most famous creations, at least in his home country of Japan.<br /><br />Now Vertical, a small-press imprint that has made a habit of translating Tezuka’s works for U.S. audiences, is serializing in what will eventually be a 17-volume collection of these medical tales. The first three volumes are in stores now.<br /><br />Written for young audiences, the series combines high melodrama (the main character has a thing for wearing long, black capes) with an eye for medical detail (Tezuka trained to be a doctor).<br /><br />As a result, the squeamish might have trouble with the manga as organs, bones and blood are plentiful and drawn as realistically as possible (in sharp contrast to the series’ more cartoony, slapstick style).<br /><br />Often, “Black Jack” takes a turn toward the bizarre or downright implausible: That story about Black Jack’s sidekick, a baby-faced, lisping cutie named Pinoko.<br /><br />She looks 5, but she’s actually 18, as she lived for several years in the body of her twin sister as an amniotic sac of organs before Black Jack built her a synthetic body. Oh, and she thinks of herself as Black Jack’s wife.<br /><br />I cherish that sort of inspired lunacy from Tezuka. But I think ultimately what makes the manga work is its ongoing themes of humanism, sacrifice and the cruelty we constantly inflict on ourselves.<br /><br />As a surgeon, Black Jack might be superhuman, but ultimately his adventures tell us a lot about our own frailty.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Copyright The Patriot-News, 2009</span></span>Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-53205781635080155812009-02-20T09:49:00.008-05:002009-02-20T10:30:19.834-05:00Well, that was fun while it lastedBack when the newspaper that employs me had a books page, I'd occasionally run short reviews of comics, more as a space filler than anything else. One of the higher-up editors, however, who was in charge of redesigning the Living sections at the time, was a comics fan and said "You know, we should turn that into a weekly column. It would go great with that new Friday section we're putting together."<br /><br />Thus Graphic Lit was born. Overall, the weekly column has been extremely good to me. I got to talk to a lot of artists and writers I admired, I got to be exposed to a lot of great books and new talent, and it led to some interesting and exciting gigs, like giving lectures at my local library or blogging regularly over at Blog@Newsarama, er, I mean <a href="http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/">Robot 6</a>.<br /><br />But all that is over, for now at least. The last Graphic Lit column ran a few weeks ago and I've been pretty much told there's no real interest in bringing it back. There's a number of factors responsible for it's passing, the biggest one being a simple lack of space. With the ever-shrinking news hole, we don't have the space to run full-length movie reviews, let alone a weekly column extolling the glories of folks like Kazuo Umezu. Add to that a renewed focus on local news and some changes in my job duties and you've got a death knell.<br /><br />But what about the video games I hear some of you cry? Well, those are pretty much dead in the water as well. Again, the lack of space is mostly to blame, but to be honest, I've been less and less able to get fired up about video games lately. They require a huge time investment that I just don't have right now. More to the point, though, I find it harder and harder to get interested in the constant cookie-cutter sequels and third-rate "party games" that are glutting the market right now. It seems there's little inspiration or creativity going on in the industry, at least from where I'm sitting.<br /><br />Don't worry, I'm not going to stop blogging. I'll still be contributing regularly over at Robot 6.<br /><br />As for Panels and Pixels, well I haven't quite figured out what I want to do with this blog yet. I'd like to keep it going -- I have a lot of ideas, some comics-related, some not. Robot 6 eats up a lot of my free time, though, so I don't know if I could commit to keeping track of two blogs on a regular basis.<br /><br />At any rate, I have a few more GL columns to post here, including an interview with Ed Brubaker that never got to see the light of day. In the meantime, if you feel like it, drop me a line in the comments and let me know what you'd like to see me do with this space. Should I try to keep Graphic Lit going online? Thrust myself into the video game breech again? Write about something else entirely, like movies or macrame? I'd love to hear your thoughts.Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-22755875540635301832009-01-06T16:08:00.014-05:002009-01-15T16:18:06.239-05:00Graphic Lit: An interview with Scott Adams<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SW-nxRSu1HI/AAAAAAAAA_M/vLjGuMI5zRk/s1600-h/41giVtbQqhL._SL500_.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 218px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SW-nxRSu1HI/AAAAAAAAA_M/vLjGuMI5zRk/s320/41giVtbQqhL._SL500_.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5291632552081020018" border="0" /></a><br />With all the dire news stories about recession, layoffs and other economic woes plaguing the country, it seems fitting somehow to note that this year marks the 20th anniversary of the comic strip “Dilbert,” the ever-funny, ever-savage satire of life in the modern workplace.<br /><br />Creator Scott Adams celebrated the anniversary recently with <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dilbert-2-0-20-Years/dp/0740777351">“Dilbert 2.0,”</a> a ginormous slipcovered “greatest hits” collection that includes a DVD containing every strip from the past two decades.<br /><br />I talked to Adams from his studio in California about the new collection and the strip’s legacy. My thanks to <a href="http://www.comicsreporter.com/">Tom Spurgeon</a> and <a href="http://talkingwithtim.com/wordpress/">Tim O'Shea</a> for their help in formulating questions.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: Tell me about the new 2.0 collection. How did it come about and how did you go about selecting the strips?</span><br /><br />A: I got a call in December a year ago and my publisher said “We’d like to fly out and talk to you,” which is an unusual thing. The telephone usually works pretty well for most things. So I knew they were about to ask me something that would be very difficult and there wouldn’t be enough time to do it. That’s usually what that means.<br /><br />So sure enough, they described their idea for making this big anniversary book and that we would have less time than any book of this size has ever been created basically. But I really wanted to do it and they wanted to do it and I figured it was worth the work so we cleared our calendars and went to work.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: And how did you go about picking strips? Were there any criteria regarding what to include?</span><br /><br />A: That was a hard process because I had to read every one of my comics several times and there are 8,000 of them at this point. I picked the ones that made me laugh first of all. That was my first filter, because so much time has gone by that I forget my own comics. I get to read them just like a newspaper reader at this point.<br /><br /> Secondly, anything that had a story involved with it. Sometimes I got interesting complaints or answered someone’s interesting complaint with a comic. Or sometimes I did something so naughty I can’t believe it got in a newspaper.<br /><br /> And then anything that was a key turning point in the life of the strip. When a new character was introduced or a major change, I flagged those.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: In the early days of the strip was there an “a-ha” moment for you when you felt like everything clicked, both in terms or readership and aesthetic appeal?</span><br /><br /> A: There were a lot of steps. It wasn’t a smooth increase. There were these points where something important happened. Probably the biggest one was when I started running my email address in the strip. That was about 1993. At the time, not many people had email so it was a big deal to include my email address in the strip, between the panels.<br /><br /> I got all this email from people that said “We like your strip. We don’t love it. But we do love it when Dilbert is doing things at work.” Which was a big deal because up till that point he wasn’t at work very much. He was a guy that had a job but didn’t spend much time at it. He was usually at home inventing something in his basement.<br /><br /> The email was almost universally consistent on that point. So I just changed the strip and put him in the workplace. That’s pretty much when it took off.<br /><br /> There were some other moments, like when Bill Watterson retired it opened up a lot of things. When I published the <span style="font-style: italic;">Dilbert Principle</span> and that was a number-one best seller. That was another big push.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: You talk in the beginning of the book about how interested you were in cartooning as a child. What was it specifically about cartooning that appealed to you?</span><br /><br /> A: You know just about half of every 12-year-old boys want to become cartoonists. It’s just some phase you go through. Apparently there’s some aspect of the maturation process that did not hit me, cause it never really went away. I could rationalize it and tell you it seemed like a good job because I could work for myself and be created and I liked comics, I could tell you all that stuff, but that would be true for every 12-year-old kid. What’s different is it never went away.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: But was it something specific about making cartoons or comic strips that took with you as opposed to writing books or making music or whatever?</span><br /><br /> A: I think it was a function of where I thought my talents were. I knew I wasn’t going to do fine portrait painting because I didn’t have that kind of artistic chops. I have a — usually, not today so much — economical way with words that kind of suits the comic format.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: You include a lot of your early work in the book. What was it like to revisit that early material?</span><br /><br /> A: Looking at my early drawings, the first thing I wondered was why doesn’t everyone become a famous cartoonist? (laughs) Cause obviously there wasn’t much prodigy in attendance.<br /><br />I really think it was my MBA that made me successful as a cartoonist, which is not a joke. Most artists have the artists have the attitude of “I’m going to do what I think is right and the audience will follow.” But if you have a business degree you say what does the market want and how can I give it to them. It’s probably not a huge surprise that Dilbert is arguably one of the last mega strips to come out in the past 20 years.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: You have a lot of notes in the new book. What do you think is one of the big revelations here that readers might not have known about you before?</span><br /><br /> A: Oh man. My life is such an open book I don’t know if there’s anything.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: That’s kind of why I asked the question, because you have been very open about the strip and how it came to be.</span><br /><br /> A: Well a lot of that was intentional in that I always thought that what made a comic strip more interesting is if you knew a little bit about the person who wrote it. Because if you read it every day it’s almost like you’re forming a relationship with the cartoonist.<br /><br />As a reader, that’s how I always felt. I felt like I could tell when Schulz was in a bad mood. Or feeling a little blue. It just seemed to be reflected in his strip. And so I took that to the next level and said the more people know about me the more they can enjoy the whole product. So I think the thing that would maybe surprise people the most is that I never considered myself a cartoonist so much as an entrepreneur.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Along the same lines, it occurred to me that you prefigured a lot of the Webcomics that are popular today in that you’re one of the first cartoonists that have had a really direct relationship with their audience. What are the pros and cons of that sort of relationship?</span><br /><br /> A: Well, I think this ties back to my comment about being more of a businessperson than a cartoonist in the sense that a huge amount of the input I get is negative and always has been. I think from the first time I got email in 1993, every once in a while I get the letter that says “I used to be a fan but you’ve really gone downhill. You’ve lost it. I wish you could get back to whatever you were doing that worked before.”<br /><br />Every year I get a number of those. And they’re tough to read. If you have an artist’s mentality, that would crush you and you’d just stop doing it. But you would also miss out on all the useful stuff like the people who wrote and told you that Catbert was their favorite character after he had only appeared twice in the comic. I had no intention of keeping him.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: Along the same lines though I imagine there must be times where you have to trust your own instincts. How do you know when reader input is worth listening to versus someone just ranting?</span><br /><br /> A: Well the great thing is you can do both. I can just try something and see what the reaction is. The reaction doesn’t lie. They have no reason to be nice to me obviously. When I do something that doesn’t work, no matter how much I thought it would work, if the reaction is negative I just get off of it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Can you give me an example?</span><br /><br /> A: I’ll give you the most direct example. I tried to start a second comic strip, something called “Plop.” It was about a little boy who’s the only hairless Elbonian. It was based on the thought that once I figured out how to be a cartoonist and learned all the tricks that starting a new comic that wasn’t bound by the workplace would be a big hit because obviously I knew how to be a cartoonist, I already had the audience. I had all the assets to make that work.<br /><br />But I just got eviscerated by readers who saw it. It never got published in newspapers; I tried it out on the Internet first. The trap that was completely invisible to me is that people didn’t compare it to a new comic strip. As if it had been somebody else who had made it. They compared it to where <span style="font-style: italic;">Dilbert </span>was after 10 years of development.<br /><br />If for example you looked at the first year of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Simpsons </span>TV show and compared it to any comic strip or show you see now, it would look awful. You’d have never predicted it would become on of the biggest hits of all time. And the thing is that when it came out it was compared to nothing, because there wasn’t anything like it. Then they had the luxury of hiring talent and making money and becoming arguable as some people have said the best show ever on television.<br /><br /> <span style="font-style: italic;">Dilbert </span>had already gone through 10 years and people can’t help comparing it to me. So my new stuff didn’t really have a chance. That was a interesting experiment in human behavior.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: You talk a lot in the book about people’s overreactions to some strips, the letter from the Square Dance Association being my favorite. Is there a particularly memorable negative reaction that stands out for you?</span><br /><br /> A: In terms of surprising, I’d say the people who complained about my references to cannibals. I thought cannibals were on TV, the movies, jokes; cannibals are everywhere. It’s just a funny concept. And when I did jokes about cannibals people would write angry letters to their editors, objecting to my cannibal references. That by the way, is an example of something that doesn’t happen anymore. I don’t know if society changed or <span style="font-style: italic;">Dilbert </span>just became more popular, but I get a little bit of a free pass now.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: You don’t get those kind of complaints?</span><br /><br /> A: I’ve written about cannibals since then just to see what would happen and I got no complaints.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: That’s another thing you talk about in the book, how you’ve managed to make the humor a little edgier as it’s gone along. It’s interesting to note how certain words have become acceptable on the newspaper page. Do you think that’s just you, or do you think the comics page is becoming a bit more accepting of the kind of PG-rated humor?</span><br /><br /> A: Well, I think the more successful you are the more you can get away with, so there’s a little bit of that. There’s also the recognition that <span style="font-style: italic;">Dilbert </span>is not your kids cartoon. That gives me a little extra. It’s often on the comics page just as often on the business page. So I think that gives me a little bit of flexibility. But it’s all in the psychology of the editors. I can’t really get in their heads that much.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Do you think you’ve become a better artist as the strip’s gone along?</span><br /><br /> A: Yeah, I would say so. If you practice this much at anything, you’ll be better. My lines are smoother and the characters look the way I like them instead of whatever they were when I ran out of time.<br /><br /> When I drew on paper, which I don’t do anymore so it’s easier to correct and get it right this time, I used to have a day job for the first six years. So wherever I could do it — an hour an a half — was what it was. Sometimes it was acceptable and sometimes it wasn’t but I didn’t go back. I just didn’t have that luxury.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: Do you think cartoonists these days quit their day jobs too soon? Was there a benefit to keeping your day job as long as you did?</span><br /><br /> A: Well, in the sense that I had more business experience and it’s a business cartoon, but otherwise no I don't think so.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: How has corporate culture changed in the years you’ve been doing the strip and how do you keep abreast of those changes?</span><br /><br /> A: I still get lots of email from people and I am my own business to a large extent. The Dilbert Empire, if I can call it that, is a business with meetings and conference calls and contracts and lawyers and all that stuff. I’m kind of always in it. And I own a couple of restaurants, which give me the human dynamics that you can never imagine without observing them. There’s a little of that.<br /><br /> Then there’s the memories that never really change. I liken it to if you were going to prison for five years and then ten years later somebody says “Oh, you’ve pretty much forgotten what that was like, right?” You’d say, “No, I pretty much remember that.” And then there’s the fact that things don’t change that much. The technology changes. There are things like IMing someone at work versus conference calling them from the next cubicle, so that stuff changes, the ability to outsource is greater than before, but that stuff is in the headlines. It’s not too tough to know where that’s going.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: Is it harder to make jokes about the corporate environment when people are losing their jobs? Do you worry about cutting too close to the bone?</span><br /><br /> A: Oddly enough that’s when Dilbert had it’s biggest surge, during the downsizing of the mid-90s. The more miserable people were the more they wanted somebody to represent their misery, represent their point of view and displeasure of the whole thing. My popularity tends to track with the misery index. The worst time for <span style="font-style: italic;">Dilbert</span>, in terms of licensing and everything else, was during the dot-com era when everyone felt that if they weren’t already a millionaire it must be their own fault.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: I had mentioned to someone that I was going to be interviewing you and they said Dilbert was almost too painful for them to read at times. Have you ever gotten a complaint like that?</span><br /><br /> A: I hear that a lot. It varies from joke to joke. I can see that. There are TV shows about restaurant owners like <span style="font-style: italic;">Hell’s Kitchen</span>. I can’t watch those cause that’s too much like work.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: How do you settle on the design of a character, something like the pointy-haired boss? At what point do you look at it and say “That’s the character”</span>?<br /><br /> A: A lot of it is just accident. As I talk about in the book, his hairstyle which has become the defining characteristic for the boss, just defined itself over time. One day my pen slipped I just drew one of his tufts of hair a little too tall once. I made the other one equal and it just drifted into that pointy-haired direction over time until he started to look right. So I have a quote which I said a long time ago, it’s probably the thing that gets quoted the most, that creativity is making mistakes and art is knowing which ones to keep. So the creativity in the character design is mostly mistakes and the art is knowing that Dilbert looks better without a mouth. It’s a mistake by any definition, it just looks better that way.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Is that something you realized as you went along or were you conscious of it right away?</span><br /><br /> A: He was originally a doodle, and when he was a doodle he had a mouth. There was probably jut some day — I don’t remember it happening — but I’m sure what happened is I drew him without a mouth, looked at it and said “Huh. Looks a little better.”<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Like you said, you are one of the last mega-strips. What’s your take on the current state of comics strips? Is it as dire as people are saying the newspaper industry in general is?</span><br /><br /> A: Well, yeah, things are pretty dire. I think the thing that hurts comic strips the most, I that unlike television and unlike movies that are able to be essentially uncensored so they can drift to accommodate popular tastes which got more edgy, they weren’t allowed to get edgy, and couldn’t grow with the preferences of the public.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: That’s a complaint I’ve heard from a couple of comic strip artists, people like Stephen Pastis. The other complaint I hear a lot is about legacy strips. That there’s no room for new people to come in the door, because readers still want Snuffy Smith even though it’s 80 years old.</span><br /><br /> A: OK, now you’re channeling Pastis.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Actually a couple of people have told me that, not just him.</span><br /><br /> A: There’s definitely that. Especially if the strip has been handed off to another artist or the kids or something. You’ve gotta assume that it would be unlikely that a second person would have whatever spark that made the first person so special that they got in the newspaper in the first place.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Do you follow the Webcomics scene at all? And if so, do you feel any sort of affinity towards those comics?</span><br /><br /> A: No, I don’t follow them but I look at the social Web sites a lot like Digg and Reddit, and so quite often they point to them, and when that happens I look at it.<br /><br /> But I do follow Basic Instruction. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that one.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: No, I don’t think I’ve seen that one.</span><br /><br /> A: I did a little experiment on my blog. We tried to get him to become a syndicated cartoonist. We had him switch to a comic strip format and character-driven stuff. That turned out to not be successful but it was a good little boost to his popularity. What he does is just fricking hilarious.<br /><br />Actually if you want an example, he is the perfect example of what’s wrong with comic strips in the newspaper. Here’s a guy who writes a comic that is completely g-rated, because it’s in a square four-box format and doesn’t draw like other people he has almost no chance of being a popular syndicated cartoonist and yet if you showed it to 20 people, 10 of them would say that’s funnier than anything that’s in the newspaper today. The quality of his art is not a predictor of his ability to succeed in newspapers. I don’t know if that’s true in other media.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: I think in comics, timing and being able to tell a joke is much more important than necessarily artistic ability. I think the craft in comics comes from layout and timing.</span><br /><br /> A: That’s why Basic Instruction is so interesting, because his writing is what is sensational.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: How long have you been drawing Dilbert on the computer now?</span><br /><br /> A: I think it’s been about three years.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: Other than the obvious — you’ve had this debilitating health problem — how has drawing the strip on the computer helped you? What are the benefits?</span><br /><br /> A: A lot of benefits. Anything that involves a straight line I can draw a lot better now. I can finish things in half the time which means if I want to do something that’s a little more complex, it buys me the time to do it. And I enjoy it. It’s just easier. It’s a more pleasant experience.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: How so? Can you give me a little more detail?</span><br /><br /> A: Well pen and paper is kind of tedious. It’s small and tiny and you’re hunched over. Even if you have a drawing board. It feels like work. Since we’ve been talking I’ve finished half a cartoon. (laughs) I did the writing already, I was just finishing up the art work. I can talk with one hand and draw with the other. If I draw a bad line I literally push one button and redraw it. Drawing a bad line with pen and paper used to be a huge pain in the ass. What you do is look at it and say “Eh, maybe it’s not really that bad.”<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: One of the things I enjoyed in your notes in the book is when you talk about the rules of making a strip. What for you is the most important, number one rule in making a funny comic strip?</span><br /><br /> A: Well, for <span style="font-style: italic;">Dilbert </span>in particular the number one rule is if there is something you can relate to in it. So I don’t have Dilbert going to the moon and a giant salamander eats his head.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: I wouldn’t mind seeing that.</span><br /><br /> A: I know. That’s the kind of comic I did in the first few years that people objected to. It’s the type of thing that other cartoonists like to read, but the public in general is interested in one and only one thing — themselves. Everybody wants to see something about them.<br /><br />Even now I’m doing a series where Dilbert will eventually lose his job. You’ll see that in a month or so. But I worry because I don’t take that series too far because all the people who did not lose their job aren’t going to be able to relate to it. So you hope that there are enough people that have been laid off — and I think that’s true at this point — everyone knows somebody close to them that’s going through the same set of emotions so that even if they say “that’s not me” they say “oh my god, that’s Bob. I’m going to send this to Bob.”<br /><br /> So I usually go for something recognizable and then something cruel, something bad is happening to somebody. I make one of the characters a talking cat or something like that so that bizarre is in the mix too.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: You were talking before about business culture. Is there anything you can make fun of now that you couldn’t say 10 years ago?</span><br /><br /> A: There’s the ability to track what your employees are doing, which is interesting because they have company cell phones with GPS. You can track their keystrokes in some cases. you can track their IDs so you know where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing. That’s a little different.<br /><br />I think maybe just ability to work from everywhere is different. Everything that’s different I would say is technology related. The basic human interactions where you put three people in a room and one of them is an asshole every time, that just never changes. It will always be true that all three people have a different opinion of which one’s the asshole.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: You talked about listening to your audience and mentioned getting a lot of negative complaints. Do you worry about jumping the shark, losing a connection with your audience?</span><br /><br /> A: You’re not in this business unless you worry about that every time you pick up the pencil or whatever this is I’ve got in my hand. You should have a certain amount of panic every time you draw a comic. Without that, I think the whole things falls apart. The reality of whether I need to worry about that is separate from the fact that it’s built into the process. It ought to be.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: It’s healthy in other words.</span><br /><br /> A: Yeah. A healthy fear.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: You talk in the book about writing affirmations really helped you focus and get <span style="font-style: italic;">Dilbert </span>published. I was wondering if that’s something you still do.</span><br /><br /> A: Well you hear me talking, right? I don’t know if you know this story, but I couldn’t talk for three and a half years.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: I didn’t know whether to bring it up or not.</span><br /><br /> A: It’s not a sensitive issue.<br /><br />So I lost my voice through this thing called spasmodic dysphonia. It was considered incurable, just like my hand problem was. But I was actually the first person — I don’t know if I wrote about this or not — but I was the first person who ever essentially — I won’t call it a cure — but found a way around my hand problem. Through just constant repetition of small motions that weren’t quite the motion that caused me trouble. After a period of years it remapped itself.<br /><br />At the moment my hand is also fixed because I haven’t used it in a classic drawing or writing way unless I write a check or write a sticky note to myself. But for all of those normal uses — as long as I don’t have to write a college essay — it’s never going to be a problem again.<br /><br />So I have experience with two incurable problems that I personally have cured. And for both of them I used affirmations. What are the odds? I’m not the only person who had the surgery to fix his voice, but there are probably millions of people who have spasmodic dysphonia, and don’t even know the doctor exists. I kind of came at it through several indirect connections that got me to where I needed to be. Although I probably sound a little nasally or hoarse right now on the phone the thing you don’t know is that is my normal voice. You’re probably wondering.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: I thought it might be the phone connection.</span><br /><br /> A: The spasmodic dysphonia sounds like a bad cell phone connection, so if I were to say “My name is Scott Adams,” which incidentally I could not say, it would sound like “My ame Cott Ada.” That’s all you would hear on the phone. I basically couldn’t use the telephone to order a pizza or spell my name or anything like that.<br /><br />It’s a good thing my job involves comics. That’s also a reason why I started blogging. It was a way to communicate. And when you don’t have a way you’re used to, you kind of need an outlet.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: With the affirmations, do you think it just gives you an ability to focus better? Articulate your goals better?</span><br /><br /> A: Well, it’s probably several things. I wrote about this in my book <span style="font-style: italic;">God’s Debris</span>, that was my first non-Dilbert book.<br /><br /> I think it’s a number of things. One possibility I’ll call the Boltzmann Brain theory. Do you know the theory?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: No, I don’t.</span><br /><br /> A: If you Google it you’ll find out there are serious physicists who have calculated the odds of the universe just kind of existing in the state that’s perfect for life and the odds that this is all imagined by one brain, because it’s easier for the universe to create simple things such as one brain than an entire universe filled with six billion brains on this planet and other life forms on other planets and all that. There are serious people who say that this reality is not in any way what we think it is. It’s an imagined reality. And if it’s an imagined reality, theoretically you could program it and perhaps affirmations is a mechanism to doing that. Changing what you imagine in other words.<br /><br /> That’s one theory. I don’t accept that theory (laughter), but I’m just putting it out there. It’s one that serious scientists, people who are not even nuts, say is infinitely more probable than whatever you think is real.<br /><br /> The other possibilities are it’s what you said, it’s if you focus more on your goal — and there’s something called reticular activation, which is a fancy name for saying you recognize your own name across a crowded room more than other noises. You just notice stuff that you’re kind of tuned into.<br /><br />So I tuned myself into all things voice-related and the way I diagnosed my problem with my voice is I woke up one day and thought “I wonder if this has anything to do with my hand problem.” I googled Dystonia, which is the problem with the hand, and voice and up popped a video of someone with spasmodic dysphonia who sounded exactly like I did. That led me down the path that ultimately led me to the solution. It took three and a half years because I tried everything but surgery first, which is rational. But I think back about that moment when I realized which two words to Google, that’s exactly the type of thing that happens when you’re doing affirmations.<br /><br />Now I can’t say it’s because of affirmations but it’s exactly the type of thing. You notice things or you think of things that you wouldn’t have noticed or thought of without that. So it seems like an insight, but it probably is just a very normal process of focus. The other possibility is affirmations don’t work at all and it’s selective memory. And that I may have done affirmations on lots of things that didn’t work but I don’t remember them. I don’t think that’s the case, you know if you write something down every day for a long period of time it’s hard to forget it. I think it’s worked just about every time.<br /><br /> The other possibility is and this one I kind of lean towards, that on some subconscious level you’re a better judge of yourself than you are on a conscious level. And your subconscious if it even allows you that much time writing something down as a goal, it probably has a good sense that you can really pull it off.<br /><br />So, for example, if I started writing “I want to become an Olympic gymnast” I’m positive that after the second day my subconscious would find something better for me to do because it knows that one isn’t going to work. When I wrote down “I’ll become a syndicated cartoonist” or “I’ll have a number one bestselling book,” even though those seem unlikely to any rational observer including myself, on some subconscious level I knew I had the ability to make that happen. That’s kind of my best guess.<br /><br /> The way it works is almost irrelevant isn’t it?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Has Dogbert been in the strip lately? I don’t think I’ve seen him in it as often as usual.</span><br /><br /> A: As a matter of fact I noticed that myself recently. I’m trying to put him back in a little more.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: So it wasn’t anything conscious on your part?</span><br /><br /> A: Yeah, these things happen kind of accidentally. Ashok the intern hasn’t been in lately either. There’s no reason.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: I was reading a story recently about the Belgian cartoonist Herge who did a all-ages series called Tintin. They found a bunch of his letters where he rails about how trapped he feels by his character because he’d been doing this character all his adult life. Alongside this question about losing your audience, do you worry about being trapped by Dilbert?</span><br /><br /> A: Well let me answer the bigger question by saying that cartoonists are the biggest whiners. “Oh boo hoo, I’m a famous cartoonist. I make millions of dollars by sitting in a chair.” (laughter) Well, fuck you. If that’s what you’re complaining about, that you’re trapped by your character that made you famous and let you live in the big house, try a real job.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: At the same time I always read stories about people who feel trapped by their characters and start to resent them. It seems odd, but at the same time it’s there.</span><br /><br /> A: Well, I’m not going to deny that I have those feelings, but I am going to deny complaining about it.Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-51666400309387184252008-12-31T14:32:00.002-05:002008-12-31T14:43:33.987-05:00Graphic Lit: Best comics of 2008Readers were rewarded with a wealth of stellar comics this year. There were so many good books, in fact, that attempting to group them in some sort of hierarchy could be a bit of a mug’s game.<br /> <br />Not that it’s going to stop me. As before, I thought I’d trot out what I hope will be my annual awards list, tentatively called “The Moxies.” (What? It was my nickname in college.)<br /> <br />Here then, organized into completely arbitrary categories in order for me to include as much good work as possible, are my picks for the best comics of 2008.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Best Original Graphic Novel: </span>“What It Is” by Lynda Barry. This revealing and fearlessly original work deserves as much attention and accolades as it can get.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Runners-up:</span> “Tamara Drewe” by Posey Simmonds, “The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard,” by Eddie Campbell, “Three Shadows” by Cyril Pedrosa, “Bottomless Belly Button” by Dash Shaw.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Best Debut:</span> “Skyscrapers of the Midwest” by Josh Cotter. New cartoonists shouldn’t be able to create works so assured and emotionally devastating right out of the gate.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Runner-up:</span> “Swallow Me Whole” by Nate Powell.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Best Collection of Previously Published Material:</span> “Willie &amp; Joe” by Bill Mauldin. Fantagraphics’ massive collection of Mauldin’s WWII work gives new generations the chance to experience it.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Runners-up: </span>“The Explainers” by Jules Feiffer, “Breakdowns” by Art Spiegelman, “Where Demented Wented: The Art and Comics of Rory Hayes,” “Jamilti and Other Stories” by Rutu Modan.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Best memoir: </span>“Little Nothings: the Curse of the Umbrella” by Lewis Trondheim. Master Trondheim once again shows how it’s done, this time providing a bit of navel-gazing that never becomes solipsistic.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Runners-up: </span>“Paul Goes Fishing” by Michel Rabagliati, “Haunted” by Philippe Dupuy.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Best European Book:</span> “Alan’s War” by Emmanuel Guibert. Guibert uses his friend’s ruminations to provide a unique look at WWII.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Runners-up: </span>“The Rabbi’s Cat Vol. 2” by Joann Sfar, “Aya of Yop City” by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Best Manga: </span>“Disappearance Diary” by Hideo Azuma. A chronicle of homelessness and alcoholism that refuses to be gloomy, “Diary” is perhaps the cutest story about despair you’ll ever read.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Runners-up: </span>“Dororo” by Osamu Tezuka, “Cat-Eyed Boy” by Kazuo Umezu, “Red-Colored Elegy” by Seiichi Hayashi, “Good-Bye” by Yoshihiro Tatsumi.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Best General Nonfiction Book: </span>“Burma Chronicles” by Guy Delisle. Delisle chronicles his time spent in a far-off, oppressive country with enormous good humor and insight.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Best New Series: </span>“Love and Rockets New Stories” by Jamie, Gilbert and Mario Hernandez. OK, it’s not a pamphlet and it’s not like the Hernandez brothers are new to the scene. I don’t care. I loved this comic.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Runners-up:</span> “RASL” by Jeff Smith, “Glamourpuss” by Dave Sim.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Best Superhero Comic: </span>“Omega the Unknown” by Jonathan Lethem and Farel Dalrymple. Lethem and Dalrymple offer a decidedly off-kilter take on the traditional superhero tale.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Runners-up: </span>“The Boys” by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Best Kids Comic: </span>“Optical Allusions” by Jay Hosler. Hosler drops science with visual aplomb and shows a knack for engaging small minds on tough subjects.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Runners-up: </span>“Kaput &amp; Zosky” by Lewis Trondheim, “Little Vampire” by Joann Sfar.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Best Comic Strip:</span> “Cul de Sac” by Richard Thompson. I don’t care what y’all say. This is one of the funniest strips to come down the pike in years.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Runner-up:</span> “Lio” by Mark Tatulli.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Best Book About Comics: </span>“Most Outrageous: The Trials and Trespasses of Dwaine Tinsley and Chester the Molester” by Bob Levin. I didn’t get around to reviewing this in my column, but I’m recommending it now anyway. It’s a harrowing look at family, art and the legal system via the life of Tinsley, a Hustler cartoonist who found his envelope-pushing work used against him when he was accused of abusing his daughter.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Runners-up: </span>“The Ten-Cent Plague” by David Hajdu, “Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front” by Todd DePastino, “Gary Panter,” edited by Dan Nadel.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Best Comic I Didn’t Get Around to Reviewing in this Column: </span>“Travel” by Yuichi Yokoyama. Obsessed with motion to the point of abstraction, Yokoyama’s comics are unlike anything produced either in Japan or here in the U.S.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Runners-up: </span>“Ganges #2” by Kevin Huizenga, “The Education of Hopey Glass” by Jamie Hernandez.Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-15955706753463306992008-12-22T15:48:00.003-05:002008-12-22T20:38:29.954-05:00Graphic Lit: Graphic novel mish-mosh<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SU_90NXaQBI/AAAAAAAAA9E/aLfe_PxG_x4/s1600-h/bourbon+islandcovercolor.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 233px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SU_90NXaQBI/AAAAAAAAA9E/aLfe_PxG_x4/s320/bourbon+islandcovercolor.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5282719961311756306" border="0" /></a><br />The end of the year draws ever closer and yet there are tons of notable books I haven’t mentioned.<br /><br />Let’s try to rectify that somewhat with this quick review:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">“Bourbon Island 1730” by Lewis Trondheim and Appollo, 288 pages, $17.95. </span><br /><br />The idea of Trondheim doing a pirate story sets up expectations of high farce in the manner of his “Dungeon” series.<br /><br />The big twist then, is that he and collaborator Appollo play it completely straight, telling a realistic, melancholy tale of colonialism, slavery and the end of piracy that proves to be quite moving and thoughtful despite the fact that the characters are rendered as funny animals.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">“Gus &amp; His Gang” by Chris Blain, 176 pages, $17.95. </span><br /><br />The unbelievably talented Blain offers a subversive take on the American Western. The catch here is that Gus and his band of expert bank robbers are more concerned (nay, obsessed) with hooking up with beautiful women than making money and keeping one step away from the cops.<br /><br />Blain portrays the men as hapless romantics, eager to pitch woo but utterly flummoxed as to how to go about doing so. Their cluelessness toward the opposite sex is hilarious and endearing, especially in the case of Clem, a family man who finds himself besotted by an adventurous cowgirl. “Gus” is the rare funny book that resonates as well as entertains.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">“Chiggers” by Hope Larson, Antheneum Books, 176 pages, $9.99. </span><br /><br />Returning to summer camp, Abby finds herself adrift from her usual clique and ends up making friends with Shasta, the new, weird girl everyone hates.<br /><br />It’s a slight tale, and I had trouble at times telling the supporting characters apart. Still, Larson shows a real inventiveness (I particularly like the way she handles sound effects) and she takes enough care in shaping her main characters for the book to win over its target audience.<br /><br />Buy it for the young tween girl in your life.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">“Freddie &amp; Me” by Mike Dawson, Bloomsbury, 304 pages, $19.99. </span><br /><br />Dawson humorously recounts his lifelong obsession with Queen’s lead singer Freddie Mercury in this memoir. Dawson is a good raconteur and caricaturist, but he never examines why Mercury and his music meant so much to him and as a result the book feels more than a bit superficial.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">“A Treasury of XXth Century Murder: The Lindbergh Child” by Rick Geary, NBM, 80 pages, $15.95. </span><br /><br />Having chronicled various gruesome true tales of 19th-century homicide, Geary moves up a century to chronicle a news story that held all of America in its grip in 1932 — the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby son.<br /><br />True to form, Geary avoids sensationalism to lay out the details of the crime and subsequent trial in thorough, objective fashion. It’s an engaging, fascinating recounting of a sad tale that underscores what a remarkable talent Geary is.<br /><span style="font-size:78%;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008</span></span>Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-7387787155473872522008-12-16T13:06:00.003-05:002008-12-16T13:49:34.374-05:00Graphic Lit: Alan's War<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SUf3vN-V9vI/AAAAAAAAA80/vCSFzJVr26I/s1600-h/Page+154+copy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 216px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SUf3vN-V9vI/AAAAAAAAA80/vCSFzJVr26I/s320/Page+154+copy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280461478692255474" border="0" /></a>Those who sit down with <a href="http://us.macmillan.com/alanswar">“Alan’s War”</a> expecting a conventional World War II memoir might come away disappointed.<br /><br />Cope didn’t take part in any big, famous battles. He didn’t join the Army until late in the war and spent a good bit of his initial time in training. He got into few firefights and witnessed only one scene of brutal violence (which was a stupid accident).<br /><br />Despite — or perhaps because of — Cope’s memoir, “Alan’s War,” transcribed and illustrated by French cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert, is one of the most fascinating accounts of life during wartime I’ve read in awhile.<br /><br />Guibert (“Sardine in Outer Space,” “The Professor’s Daughter”) met the then-elderly Cope in 1994 and struck up a close friendship that resulted in this book.<br /><br />Cope is a natural storyteller, relating in relaxed, easygoing detail the people and places he happened upon during the war and afterward, when he resettled in Europe. He exhibits a curiosity that is constantly rewarded by serendipity.<br /><br />Guibert keeps his backgrounds as sparse as possible in the book, often putting his figures against all-white backgrounds with only the occasional building lining the background. When he does provide detail, the lush black and white watercolors provide a breathtaking contrast.<br /><br />At times, what Cope doesn’t discuss is just as interesting as what he does. He details his formative friendships in the Army and Europe, but rarely talks about his family.<br /><br />His wife and children in particular seem pushed aside. Perhaps their presence would have muddied the book’s focus, but their absence nevertheless seems a trifle odd.<br /><br />What we’re left with in “Alan’s War” is the story of a man for whom war provided the opportunity to expand his horizons and visit the world beyond his backyard, in turn giving him the ability to make decisions in ways that would have never occurred to him had he stayed home.<br /><br />Perhaps that’s not exactly “The Longest Day,” but it’s a compelling tale nonetheless.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SUf4DlYONwI/AAAAAAAAA88/_hPxYti7A1E/s1600-h/Page+155+copy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 216px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SUf4DlYONwI/AAAAAAAAA88/_hPxYti7A1E/s320/Page+155+copy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280461828572198658" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008</span></span>Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-82739917079853016352008-12-14T22:23:00.003-05:002008-12-14T22:43:59.225-05:00From the vault: Tiny Tyrant<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SUXQDgmRO1I/AAAAAAAAA8k/cKnhp1OKa0s/s1600-h/tinyTyrantCover420.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 226px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SUXQDgmRO1I/AAAAAAAAA8k/cKnhp1OKa0s/s320/tinyTyrantCover420.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279854896870406994" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Note: This review originally ran in issue #286 of the Comics Journal. </span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.firstsecondbooks.com/tinyTyrant.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Tiny Tyrant</span></a> <span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />By Lewis Trondheim and Fabrice Parme</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">First Second</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">$12.95</span><br /><br />Tiny Tyrant must have taken a lot of hard work to produce.<br /><br />I say that because it seems so completely effortless. Its wit, both visual and verbal, is so razor-sharp and utterly charming, the net result seeming so delightfully tossed off, that I can only assume a lot of toil and tears when into its making.<br /><br />The book follows the adventures of King Ethelbert, the six-year-old ruler of the imaginary kingdom of Portocristo, a title that, as you may guess, gives him license to behave like a spoiled brat.<br /><br />Already I hear the gears turning in your head, no doubt imagining a variety of humorous scenarios spun off from such a story pitch. I’m willing to bet, however, you’re not imagining that in a fit of pique he might ship off all of the nation’s children out of the country and replace them with robot duplicates of himself. Or that, fed up with his small size, he would shrink the entire kingdom down to minute size.<br /><br />But that’s what’s so great about the book: it combines the premise’s dark wish fulfillment of getting your way regardless of behavior or consequences (and what adult, never mind child, hasn’t at some point dreamed of such an opportunity?) with high slapstick and a large helping of absurdity. Most of the fun is seeing how Ethelbert’s reckless behavior leads to bizarre, but within the Portocristo universe entirely logical, consequences.<br /><br />As you’d expect from the author of Mister O, Trondheim is in his element here, though he rightly tones the level of violence and scatological humor to better suit his intended audience. Parme’s art, meanwhile, compliments the text perfectly. It’s slick and assured, yet rubbery and playful enough to go absolutely loopy when called for, like when giant rats attack the city (don’t ask).<br /><br />In the end, the best sort of recommendation I can give for Tiny Tyrant is this: I wish this book had been around when I was a kid.Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-78574930690987626042008-12-12T12:49:00.004-05:002008-12-12T13:14:56.798-05:00From the vault: "God of War"<span style="font-weight: bold;">Enough with the old TCJ reviews. Here's a video game review I did for the Patriot-News back in 2005, before I started this blog. </span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SUKp0MQLf1I/AAAAAAAAAt0/LOQ-9EJEo7A/s1600-h/GOWcombat.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 260px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SUKp0MQLf1I/AAAAAAAAAt0/LOQ-9EJEo7A/s320/GOWcombat.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278968427339022162" border="0" /></a><p>When the "Prince of Persia: Warrior Within" came out a few months ago, I decried the developers' decision to fill the artful, stylish franchise with over-the-top blood and gore, Goth trappings and needless sexism.<br /></p><p>Now comes Sony's new action title "God of War," from the folks who brought "Twisted Metal Black" and "War of the Monsters." If anything, it's got more gore and Goth -- not to mention outright nudity -- than "Warrior Within."</p><p>It goes without saying, of course, that I absolutely love this game.</p><p> How is such a thing possible? How can I decry one game for its crass trappings and praise another that has virtually similar qualities? Should I just turn in my official game critics card and be done with it?</p><p> Well, to quote the old horse, it's not what you do that counts, it's how you do it. And the fact is, "God of War" is such a flawless, epic exercise that one can forgive its excesses.</p><p> In "Warrior Within," the violence and scantily-clad ladies seemed like a marketing afterthought designed to draw in puerile gamers, but "God Of War's" level of violence and other "adult" content all serve to aid the game's dark, brooding tone.</p><p> Set in ancient Greece, "War" centers on Kratos, a pasty-white warrior who rather unwisely makes one of those"be-careful-what-you-wish-for" deals with the war god Ares. Justifiably burned, Kratos sets off for revenge, helped along the way by Zeus and the rest of the Greek pantheon, who have apparently had their fill of Ares' behavior and aren't above using Kratos as<br />their pawn.</p><p> Most of Kratos' back story is revealed in bits and pieces as you play, but what you learn doesn't necessarily add much to your initial opinion of him. Even from the start, Kratos seems a bit, well, psychotic, and perhaps one of the only serious flaws in the game is that it's hard to feel anything for him as a character.</p><p> The game doesn't slavishly adhere to the classic Greek myths so much as take what it sees fit and adapt it to its own means. For example, I didn't know there was a desert right outside Athens, did you? Pandora's box, Minotaurs, Cyclopses and Medusa all show up here, but in a considerably altered fashion. This is Greek mythology filtered through a Nine Inch Nails video.</p><p> And yet, it works. The developers did a terrific job of creating a striking, beautifully designed world that seems immense without ever getting lost or being unable to figure out what to do next. It's also probably one of the best-looking games you'll ever see on a PlayStation 2.</p><p> But graphics are nothing next to solid gameplay, and it's here that "God of War" really shines. Kratos' main method of attack is a pair of swords on long chains which are in turn seared to his flesh. Kratos can whip these things around like a string of paper clips, and it's a real visual treat to see him fling them around into a horde of undead soldiers. The various attack combos available might be a bit simplified for hard-core action fans, but I found them easy to learn and utilize and the ability to upgrade ensured that I would never grow bored with the system.</p><p> In addition, Kratos gains magical abilities such as flinging thunderbolts or turning enemies into stone. And once you've got an enemy close to defeat, you can enact a minigame of sorts that allows you to perform a gruesome finish through some timely button pressing. Each type of enemy has a different minigame and utilizing them adds a needed level of variety.</p><p> Like a lot of current action games, "God of War" also has puzzle solving. Unlike a lot of current action games, these segments never seem tacked on or too complicated or confusing to solve.</p><p> And perhaps that's the real magic behind "God of War." Most games might focus on one element, say combat, to the detriment of others, but "War" never sacrifices one component of the game for another. Each piece feels like a part of the whole, so that what you are left with is a fluid, enthralling world with no sore thumbs sticking out.</p><p> "God of War" isn't perfect. There aren't very many boss battles to speak of and not much variety in terms of different types of enemies (which tend to come upon you in maddening wave after wave). It isn't particularly innovative and doesn't advance the art of videogames. And no doubt there will be those who will be turned off by the huge amount of blood and occasional bare breast.</p><p> What "God of War" does is polish the genre to such a sheen that it sets a benchmark in terms of the action genre. To pass it up solely because of its adult content is to deny yourself a massively good time.</p><p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SUKp0XGQfCI/AAAAAAAAAt8/AOyKkuQ0rhM/s1600-h/GOWmedusa.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 284px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SUKp0XGQfCI/AAAAAAAAAt8/AOyKkuQ0rhM/s320/GOWmedusa.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278968430250196002" border="0" /></a></p><p><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:78%;" >Copyright The Patriot-News 2005</span><br /></p>Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-78980530124062916432008-12-10T15:58:00.003-05:002008-12-10T16:01:24.248-05:00Graphic Lit: Tamara Drewe<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SUAt8pcD8AI/AAAAAAAAAts/l8YRwf0j5Cg/s1600-h/drewe.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 277px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SUAt8pcD8AI/AAAAAAAAAts/l8YRwf0j5Cg/s320/drewe.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278269283217174530" border="0" /></a><br />For decades, cartoonist Rosemary “Posy” Simmonds has been regaling U.K. readers with her sharp, sly satires of middle to upper-middle class British life.<br /> <br />Little of her work has reached American audiences, the sole exception being 2005’s stellar “Gemma Bovary,” a modern reworking of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.”<br /> <br />Her latest graphic novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tamara-Drewe-Posy-Simmonds/dp/022407816X">“Tamara Drewe,”</a> finds Simmonds drawing upon classic literature once again; this time with Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd.”<br /> <br />You don’t need to be familiar with Hardy’s novel to appreciate Simmonds’ update, nor do you need to be familiar with British life in general. Despite the occasional slang and Euro-reference, Simmonds’ characters are fully dimensional and completely recognizable.<br /> <br />The book is set in a bucolic countryside writer’s retreat, headed by the famous author Nicholas Hardiman. This seemingly idyllic milieu is turned upside-down, however, by the return of former local girl Tamara Drewe.<br /> <br />Newly confident with a nose job and newspaper gossip column, Drewe goes about unintentionally wreaking havoc, having affairs with displaced rock stars, Hardiman and others, while the caretaker she knew from her pre-surgery days quietly pines for her.<br /> <br />This being based on a Hardy book, it isn’t too long before tragedy strikes not once but twice, though some folks do manage to find a degree of happiness by the end.<br /> <br />The story is told from a variety of perspectives, both in diary and journal excerpts as well as dialogue and panels.<br /> <br />Just about every major and supporting character gets their say, from Hardiman’s long-suffering wife, to an insufferable American novelist forever working on his next book to a pair of bored teen girls, one of whom has an unhealthy fixation on the rock star Tamara is dating.<br /> <br />Simmonds gets several sharp digs in comparing the lives of the well-to-do writers and city folk who come to the country looking to “get away from it all” and the poorer country folk who “have to live here.”<br /> <br />Issues of class and snobbery linger tantalizingly in the background, as does the public’s unhealthy fixation with celebrity tabloid scandals.<br /> <br />Simmonds’ art is delightful throughout.<br /> <br />She has a real gift for body language and her use of watercolors (light blue for flashbacks or to denote a chilly winter scene) give the book an added emotional heft.<br /> <br />And though “Drewe” is loaded with text and dialogue it never feels overly busy or overburdened.<br /> <br />“Tamara Drewe” might sound a bit too dry and literary for some. But if anything it’s astoundingly down-to-earth, focusing on the concerns of real people and their messy lives.<br /> <br />Incisive, funny and touching, it’s one of the best graphic novels you’ll read this year.<br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008</span></span>Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-39939066421148402902008-12-07T20:36:00.008-05:002008-12-07T21:35:02.799-05:00From the vault: Villa of the Mysteries<span style="font-weight: bold;">This review originally appeared in issue #185 of The Comics Journal, which was a looong time ago. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Villa of the Mysteries #1</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">by <a href="http://www.mackwhite.com/">Mack White</a></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Fantagraphics Books</span><br /><br />“The Villa of the Mysteries,” a new collection of comics by Texas artist Mack White, takes its name after a famous frieze in Pompeii, the largest surviving Roman wall painting in existence. The ancient work’s real fame, however, rests on its disturbing depiction of a Dionysian ritual.<br /><br />In one section of the frieze, which White reproduces on the cover of his comic, a female with large dark wings is shown whipping a young initiate, possibly, some speculate, to prepare her for the marriage bed. Whatever is going on in that scene, however, it is a pretty safe bet that White has managed to get his finger on the same pulse.<br /><br />“Villa of the Mysteries” is obsessed with pagan rituals, especially those involving Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, fertility, and general all-out sexual abandonment. He and his cousin Pan, the god of nature, pop up either symbolically or literally in each of these short stories.<br /><br />In between those ancient references, he throws in a dollops of Christian symbolism as well, as a reminder that the line between Jesus Christ and Bacchus is a thin one. In an introduction that would make a modern mythology major proud, he writes, "Jesus is another of his [Dionysus] incarnations . . . Yet in the translation something was lost. The sexual, animal aspect of the god, deemed incompatible with Jesus' image, was projected onto Satan, and what was natural now became evil." Part of the purpose of White's book then, is to tip the scales in favor of the pagans.<br /><br />White rolls up his sleeves and dives in with the first story, the unsubtly titled "This is MK-Ultra, Baby." In the comic, big name rock star Dion Nysos (get it?) has arrived to the uptight Texan town where he was raised and abused as a child by his hypocritical aunt. While there, he spikes the punch at a party with an CIA developed aphrodisiac, causing a (dare I say it?) Dionysian frenzy.<br /><br />Yet things don't turn out quite as planned. It seems there are a number of covert government intelligence groups out to get Dion as well, and the tables end up being unexpectedly turned on him.<br /><br />As "MK-Ultra's" title suggests, White is not content with simply drawing pagan rituals and orgies. He also seems to have a genuine fondness for pulp literature and conspiracy theories involving UFOs, the U.S. government, and the Vatican. There's enough subversiveness in this one story to delight the most fervent paranoid. In fact, virtually every story in "Villa” has the feeling of coming fresh from of the headlines of the Weekly World News.<br /><br />“The Nudist Nuns of Goat Island” is a perfect example. The very title brings to mind shows like hard Copy or pulps like Spicy Tales. In this narrative, a collection of, well . . . nudist nuns . . .guard a dangerous secret on their . . . goat island. One which, if let loose, would "have meant the end of the Christian Era." No points for guessing it has something to do with sex and Grecian gods.<br /><br />The best story of the collection by far is “Cindy the Tattooed Sunday School Teacher,” perhaps because of the chilling way it reminds one of contemporary religious cults like the Branch Davidians. The tale begins in a Southern backwater, snake-handling church run by fire and brimstone preacher Brother Harris.<br /><br />Into this mix comes Sister Cindy, a former circus worker and tattooed lady whose body supposedly became engulfed with Biblical images at the moment of her conversion. Sister Cindy proves to be a powerful speaker, and it isn't long before she wrests control of the church away from Brother Harris and starts proclaiming herself "the female Christ -- the new Eve." <br /><br />Unlike the other stories, "Cindy" has a genuinely unsettling tone to it. It's not so over the top that it becomes ridiculous, unlike the one about the nudist nuns. Perhaps what adds to the tale's effectiveness is its ambivalence about Sister Cindy herself. Does she really believe herself to be the incarnation Eve or is it all a scam? Does she have the power to heal, or is she a phony? The story seems to suggest she is lying about her divinity, but she is such a powerful presence in the story, and Brother Harris is so unlikeable, that it is hard not to root for her. I have a sneaking suspicion that White wouldn't half mind us throwing out Christianity for a religion celebrating the "New Eve."<br /><br />The ambivalence shows up in White's art as well. All of White's stories are done in a very flat, deadpan style, like the cartoon religious tracts of old (Jack Chick would be proud). Yet his art reminds me nothing so much as of those Johnny Craig ECs, where square-faced men with short hair and pounds of guilt sweated over unmentionable crimes.<br /><br />The final problem with "Villa of the Mysteries" is that it's hard to tell just how seriously White expects us to take this stuff. It's hard to read lines like "Baby, I wouldn't miss this orgy for all the hash in Morocco" without chuckling. In some ways White resembles Sister Cindy herself. Is he trying to say something about the ties between modern and ancient religion, or is it all a big put-on? Both? White keeps a straight face throughout the entire book, but I can't help but feel that he's barely holding back a fit of the giggles.<br /><br />Still, if nude nuns, strange early Christian cults, tattooed Sunday School teachers, UFOs, and satyrs with really, really, really big penises are your bag of chips, then chances are this comic was tailor-made to fit you.Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-43418258735701000472008-12-03T15:27:00.003-05:002008-12-03T15:31:15.736-05:00Graphic Lit: Three from D&Q<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/STbsgzt91KI/AAAAAAAAAtk/JwQhnXbX18U/s1600-h/jamilti.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/STbsgzt91KI/AAAAAAAAAtk/JwQhnXbX18U/s320/jamilti.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275664061894087842" border="0" /></a><br />One of the things that comics do remarkably well is provide the reader with a tangible sense of place.<br /> <br />Unlike prose, which must rely on verbal descriptions, or photography, which can only show you a small section of a scene, comics can immerse you in a landscape, be it town or country, giving you a concrete feel for a particular area, real or imaginary.<br /> <br />Three new graphic novels from the small press publisher <a href="http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/">Drawn and Quarterly</a> underscore that idea by focusing on cultures and countries far outside of the U.S.’s boundaries.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">“Jamiliti and Other Stories” by Rutu Modan. </span><br /> <br />Though not an official follow-up to her acclaimed 2007 book “Exit Wounds,” this collection of short stories by Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan nevertheless proves that she’s much more than a one-trick pony.<br /> <br />Modan’s tales deal with longing and isolation, though a sly bit of satire frequently shines through, as in “The Panty Killer,” an unusual murder mystery, or “Homecoming,” about a family that is forever waiting for the return of the prodigal soldier son.<br /> <br />The early stories here tend to take on a fairy tale tone, while more recent work, such as the title story, focus on the characters and the way they brush against one another.<br /> <br />No doubt some of Modan’s themes are lost to American audiences. You get the sense that there are issues specific to Israeli concerns. That doesn’t change the fact that these are wonderful, haunting tales though, that should only further cement Modan’s reputation as a first-class storyteller.<br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">“Aya of Yop City” by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie. </span><br /> <br />This is a sequel to last year’s “Aya,” a charming look at life in the Ivory Coast during the late 1970s, when the country was prosperous and on the verge of modernity.<br /> <br />Thankfully, everything that made the first book so delightful is evident here as well. More soap opera than social drama, “Yop City” finds its characters continuing to make fools of themselves in the pursuit of love and/or success, with issues of gender, class and colonialism well hidden in the background. Only headstrong Aya, the Greek chorus of the book, has any sense.<br /> <br />The book risks turning its large cast into cartoonish types at times, but they remain winning and likable even when some of them are exhibiting inane or frustrating behavior.<br /> <br />This is a sumptuously illustrated book; Oubrerie’s art gives you a real sense of the particular place and time. Ultimately though, it’s the characters you remember best. Even if you don’t know the country, you know these people.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">“Burma Chronicles” by Guy Delisle. </span><br /><br />Having already chronicled his travels to China and North Korea (in “Shenzhen” and “Pyongyang,” respectively), Delisle ventures into Myanmar with his young son and wife, (her job for Doctors Without Borders providing the reason for the trip).<br /> <br />This is Delisle’s best book, a subtle yet pointed look at life in a totalitarian state. Delisle focuses on the everyday minutiae of expatriate life with humor and insight.<br /> <br />At times it seems as if Myanmar could be anyplace, until he abruptly runs into the poverty and cruelty pushed down upon the country. A visit with a bed-ridden elderly woman, for example, strikes home hard, and not for the reasons you might suspect.<br /> <br />Delisle exhibits a basic, blocky style here but is able to convey a wide range of emotions and issues. It’s an indelible portrait of a people forced to live in ugly circumstances that stays with you long after you’ve put the book down.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008</span></span>Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-76997472765386078712008-12-01T20:37:00.003-05:002008-12-01T20:46:36.961-05:00From the vault: The Blot<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/STSStV3BafI/AAAAAAAAAtc/77cVMDsdlhU/s1600-h/blot_cover_1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 250px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/STSStV3BafI/AAAAAAAAAtc/77cVMDsdlhU/s320/blot_cover_1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275002371217385970" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">This review originally ran in issue #287 of The Comics Journal</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.iwilldestroyyou.com/comics.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Blot</span></a> By </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://iwilldestroyyounews.blogspot.com/">Tom Neely</a><br /><br />There’s a danger in reviewing Tom Neely’s new book, The Blot, of being too effusive, praising the comic to the skies to the point where the reader starts rolling his eyeballs upward and saying “Come on. It can’t possibly be that good.” No one wants to lead the hype parade if the main float isn’t a stunner.<br /><br />And yet <span style="font-style: italic;">The Blot</span> really is that good. I’m actually sorely tempted, for example, to compare it to the first issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">Acme Novelty Library</span>, or <span style="font-style: italic;">The Biological Show</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">Good-Bye Chunky Rice</span>. Not that it’s necessarily standing on the same high aesthetic ground as those works (though I’d find it hard to believe it won’t be included on my “best of” list come January), but rather that it’s an impressive and declarative debut in the same fashion that those other books were. This is the type of book where after reading it you get the feeling you’re going to start expecting big things from the artist from here on out.<br /><br />And there you go, rolling your eyes. Never mind, let’s move on.<br /><br />The plot of this wordless graphic novel follows a nameless everyman -- let’s call him Tom, since, though I doubt he looks anything like the author, I find it hard to believe there isn’t some sort of autobiographical element that informed this work.<br /><br />Anyway, Tom’s life is irrevocably and tragically altered by the arrival of a seemingly menacing ink blot. First appearing in the daily newspaper, and then out of thin air around a corner, the blot is seemingly everywhere, the stuff of one’s most primal nightmares. It’s as small or large as it needs to be, and can even inhabit the bodies of the most innocuous-looking folks – like children.<br /><br />That being the case, the first third of the book resembles a horror film as Tom’s world starts to inexplicably disappear, only to be replaced by the ever growing and ever ominous inkblot. In fact the initial build-up in an early bathroom sequence is the type of thing you might expect in your average slasher film (though Neely subverts those expectations well).<br /><br />But again, as in most nightmares, attempting to fight off the blot only results in Tom literally battling and destroying himself. Eventually he has no recourse but to give in to it, allow it to inhabit his body, and become a social pariah.<br /><br />So far so good. In the second third of the book, our hero, resigned to his fate, his face obscured by the blot, finds succor and acceptance in the arms of a young, attractive woman. She gives him the strength to literally rise above the masses and accept his condition.<br /><br />And it’s here that that book takes one of several interesting turn. Up until now we’ve regarded the blot as a menace, a destructive, dangerous force and something to be avoided at all costs. And we’ve pitied our hero as he’s struggled with his burden. A lesser artist would have left the metaphor lie strictly on that level: a hero burdened by his cross is saved by the love of a good woman.<br /><br />Neely smartly aims for something a little stranger and deeper than that though. The woman shows Tom not only how to survive his affliction but how to thrive with it. The blot suddenly becomes capable of great works of creation, sprouting flowers where there were none, building homes, healing broken bodies. What at first was perceived as deadly is now a constructive, healing force (though it’s still capable of destruction and later serves as a formidable weapon).<br /><br />Again, a lesser book might end here, with our hero triumphant over his new-found power. It’s clear from the very beginning, however, that the woman’s feelings for Tom are ambivalent at best and more than likely fueled by pity at worst. You know from her first appearance that heartbreak can’t be far away (in fact, it’s possible that her indecisiveness is one of the few moments where Neely overplays his hand). Her eventual betrayal in a chapter suggestively titled “Wanton” and his subsequent sorrow (he literally beats himself up -- easily the most disturbing section of the book) is harrowing.<br /><br />Neely wisely never comes out and says what exactly the blot, or any of the other creatures our hero comes across, is supposed to represent. It’s enough that our hero fears its encroaching presence at all costs. There are hints scattered throughout; references to <span style="font-style: italic;">Moby Dick</span> for example. But mostly he refuses to draw any easy metaphors between the story and the human condition. It’s not surprising that Neely’s influences are strongly evident (Jim Woodring, Al Columbia, Floyd Gotttfriedson), though I should add that they’re never so strong as to threaten to overwhelm the work.<br /><br />If fact, if there’s any theme at all to <span style="font-style: italic;">The Blot</span> it’s the impermanence of things. Nothing lasts in Neely’s world, be it abstract of physical. Everything is immaterial and transient and in danger of literally fading away from one panel to the next.<br /><br />As you might imagine in a book about a destructive ink blot, Neely uses black frequently and liberally throughout the book, often having it dominate a full page, not only to separate the chapters, but often to offer an extra beat, hinting at shameful, horrors being foisted upon our hero that are best left unseen.<br /><br />Neely’s imagery, meanwhile, is stark and powerful. On a certain level, that is mainly due to the simple juxtaposition of his early 20th century big foot, Mickey Mouse cartoon style (the main character even wears three-fingered gloves) and the disturbing, adult nature of the story.<br /><br />But Neely proves to be an adept cartoonist beyond his mere rendering capabilities, using a simple grid structure, often breaking the action down into two, three or six panels per page, to wind up the tension. His sense of timing is excellent.<br /><br />The book isn’t perfect. Not all of these different stories line up perfectly in a straight line from a to b. To a small extent, the love story regarding the woman and the main character’s troubles with the blot feel like two separate stories that Neely attempted to stitch together. It’s not something so damaging as to harm the book, but it is noticeable.<br /><br />Caveats aside, The Blot remains a striking, highly original work that succeeds not only in its surreal, disturbing imagery but also in its ability to blend the sour-sad and beautiful in one volume.<br /><br />It’s not for nothing that the book’s final image is of a lemon tree, which, as the song reminds us is very pretty but impossible to eat. A talented chef, however, can use those lemons to make one hell of a pie.Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-75123992045179022572008-11-30T14:52:00.005-05:002008-11-30T16:27:25.626-05:00From the vault: Unpopular Culture<span style="font-weight: bold;">Note: This review originally appeared in issue #284 of The Comics Journal</span>.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.amazon.com/Unpopular-Culture-Transforming-European-Studies/dp/0802094120"><span style="font-style: italic;">“Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s”</span></a> <span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />by Bart Beaty</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">University of Toronto Press</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">320 pages, $29.95</span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.comicsresearch.org/blog/uploaded_images/0802094120-713821.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 144px; height: 219px;" src="http://www.comicsresearch.org/blog/uploaded_images/0802094120-713821.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />I wasn’t surprised that Bart Beaty’s new book, <span style="font-style: italic;">Unpopular Culture </span>would prove to be so readable. Anyone who’s followed Beaty’s reviews and essays in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Comics Journal</span>, particularly his seminal <span style="font-style: italic;">Eurocomics for Beginners </span>column back in the mid-1990s, ought to be well aware of how good a writer he can be. What did prove surprising to me is that a book so utterly and single-mindedly focused on the European market would actually have something to say, albeit in an indirect fashion, about American comics.<br /><br />We Yanks tend to imagine the Europeans as being much more enlightened about the art of comics than our own countrymen could ever possibly hope to be. Why, they sell comics in honest-to-god bookstores over there! And not just in the science-fiction section! They write comics about detectives and other, alternative genres! Moebius is a celebrity! Surely Europe, or at least France and Belgium, is a cartoonist’s utopia! Reading <span style="font-style: italic;">Unpopular Culture </span>will, if nothing else, clear that lie out of your mind once and for all.<br /><br />Comics, Beaty argues, may be a popular medium in Europe, but there’s a big difference between being popular and being respected. The general European public, to say nothing of the intelligentsia, has largely regarded the medium as little more than kiddie fare for the past several decades. It wasn’t until the 1990s, when companies like L’Assocition and Fremok started publishing more art-driven, less genre-derived material, that comics started to be viewed less as some sort of bourgeois kitsch to foist on the dull-minded populace and more as a work of art in its own right, deserving of respect and acclaim.<br /><br />And it is at this point bells should be going off in your brain if you know anything about the American art-comics movement of the past fifteen years or so. Despite the considerable geographic (and other) differences between the two groups, both seemed to come to prominence around the same period of time and share more than just a desire to overturn the status quo.<br /><br />What exactly happened in the 1990s is the central thrust of Beaty’s book, and he meticulously goes over what he regards as seven key issues, drawing out examples from various publishers and individual artists to show how such a change came about.<br /><br />It’s worth going over the individual chapters, not only to get a feel for how the book is laid out, but to also get back to some of those inevitable comparisons that keep cropping up. In the first chapter, Beaty shows how publishers like L’Association imposed a new aesthetic by deliberately setting itself apart from mainstream publishers like Dargaud and Humanoides. In the second, he discusses how many artists came to regard the comic book as an art object in its own right, both creating books whose very binding and choice of paper make the book want to be put on display instead of a shelf.<br /><br />In the third he examines how the small press challenged itself by undergoing formal experiments like OuBaPo, and by transforming the mixture of text and art in unprecedented ways that in some cases stretch at the very definition of what a comic is or should be.<br /><br />The rest of the book follows along similar lines. He discusses how autobiography has been used as a way for artists to declare themselves as separate from other, more popular genres. He looks at how the small-press comics movement has developed differently across the European continent. He talks about how indie artists like Joann Sfar have been absorbed into the mainstream comics publishing empire. And then he sums the whole shebang up in a winning final chapter by examining the career of Lewis Trondheim, who, as Beaty makes clear, embodies more of the changes that have gone on in European comics in the past decade and a half than any other artist.<br /><br />In a wider sense, <span style="font-style: italic;">Unpopular Culture</span> is really about the constant and continual pull between market forces and artistic choices; between the avant-garde and whatever accounts for the mainstream at any given point of time. It’s about how the avant-garde and small press define themselves by what they are not instead of what they are, thereby transforming the culture, becoming subsumed by it, and leaving the door open for another avant-garde movement to take its place.<br /><br />These are issues that every art form, from cinema to prose, deal with on an almost day-to-day basis and it’s certainly not something which American comics are immune from. That being said, aside from the occasional mention of Julie Doucet or Craig Thompson, Beaty stays clear away from discussing American comics, leaving readers to draw their own inferences.<br /><br />That’s probably for the best, as doing so would open another very large can of worms, but it’s hard not to think about how these issues affect American artists while reading the book.<br /><br />One issue that doesn’t seem to be as strong on these shores as Beaty seems to describe in his book is the line of demarcation between the U.S. mainstream and the alternative movement. While cartoonists like Dylan Horricks and Gilbert Hernandez (not to mention Ed Brubaker) have written superhero stories for the big two, it’s hard to see any one creator in the art-comix movement moving back and forth with the ease that Trondheim does. The superhero market is just too narrow a genre to accommodate most alt-cartoonists’ unique idiosyncrasies and individual art styles.<br /><br />Of course, for a long time Marvel and DC were regarded as THE ENEMY, but I wonder if that’s true anymore. The true enemy of publishers like Fantagraphics (or at least rival for their affections) may be mainstream book publishers like Pantheon and Houghton Mifflin since they’ve snatched up authors like Thompson and Kim Deitch by dangling the promise of greater financial reward in front of them. Chris Ware’s ability to shift from the mainstream book world to small indie houses like Drawn and Quarterly perhaps prove a better allusion to Trondheim’s successes than Horricks’ run on <span style="font-style: italic;">Batgirl</span> does.<br /><br />Of course, perhaps the most notable difference is that in America we largely see Deitch’s getting a book deal as a good thing, and not a betrayal of all we hold dear. It’s hard to imagine Chris Oliveros writing something akin to Jean-Christopher Menu’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Plates-Bandes</span> (which Beaty discusses at length), railing at the mainstream market for trying to co-opt the small press.<br /><br />I said <span style="font-style: italic;">Unpopular Culture</span> was readable and it is. But it has a decided academic tome and readers expecting something more akin to the relaxed and occasionally snarky prose Beaty utilized in the pages of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Comics Journal </span>may well trip over some of the meatier sentences.<br /><br />Overall, <span style="font-style: italic;">Unpopular Culture</span> is a superb, insightful and, I believe, seminal book that will undoubtedly be referenced again and again when talking not just about European comics, but art-comics in general. Obviously the more familiar you are with the works referenced, the more you’ll able to get out of the book (I’m not ashamed to say I was thrilled whenever a comic I owned was mentioned, as though I was a member of some secret club). But you don’t have to have Beaty’s level of experience and knowledge to appreciate the issues that he’s raising. Or enjoy the way he raises them.Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-45240310888614306172008-11-21T16:06:00.006-05:002008-12-03T15:26:05.460-05:00Graphic Lit: Bad meaning good<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SSx9zVbs4dI/AAAAAAAAAtU/F8SgPeQT1gA/s1600-h/9b17b4df0729b6eaa958d68c373cb72e.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 255px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SSx9zVbs4dI/AAAAAAAAAtU/F8SgPeQT1gA/s320/9b17b4df0729b6eaa958d68c373cb72e.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272727584624140754" border="0" /></a><br /><br />“My kid could draw that!”<br /><br />No doubt you’ve heard that phrase spouted at a modern art gallery once or twice. Perhaps you’ve even uttered it yourself, along with a snarky, “That’s not art.”<br /><br />We tend to have set-in-stone notions about what constitutes art, and can get riled up when confronted with something that doesn’t meet our expectations.<br /><br />Comics fans in particular can be a conservative lot, trumpeting the ability to render a contorted, physically perfect human specimen above all else.<br /><br />But does a high degree of artistic skill and craftsmanship automatically result in the ability to make great comics? After all, comics are as much about pacing, timing and narrative dexterity as they are being able to make pretty pictures.<br /><br />Take the case of Rory Hayes, for example. Hayes was a member of the underground comics movement of the 1960s, though he tends to get relegated to the background, behind more well-known figures such as Robert Crumb.<br /><br />Hayes is finally getting his due in <a href="http://www.fantagraphics.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&amp;flypage=shop.flypage&amp;product_id=1496&amp;option=com_virtuemart&amp;Itemid=62&amp;vmcchk=1&amp;Itemid=62">“Where Demented Wented,”</a> a collection of his work from Fantagraphics Books edited by Dan Nadel and Glenn Bray.<br /><br />Part of the reason Hayes slipped under the radar was because he wasn’t as prolific as his compatriots. Nor did he have their artistic chops; his art, at least initially, comes off as amateurish and stiff. His early death, at the age of 34 in 1983, no doubt played a part as well.<br /><br />But probably the biggest reason he never achieved much recognition was due to the intensity and stark horror of his unique vision. Here was an artist who gazed into the abyss and drew what he saw.<br /><br />Hayes’ initial comics were gory homages to the EC horror comics of the 1950s, usually featuring knife-wielding teddy bears plotting horrible things.<br /><br />The turning point seems to be his attempt to do a sex comic. Hayes used the opportunity to pour out every misogynist and misanthropic fear that welled inside him, resulting in the most unerotic (and just flat out grotesque) pornography in history.<br /><br />From there on out, Hayes’ comics become more psychedelic and narratively disjointed, but also more gripping and fascinating. Panels blend into one another; stories end in abrupt violence, bodies mutate and transform, heralding the apocalypse.<br /><br />There’s the strong sense of exorcism at work here, that Hayes was driven to put this material on paper, perhaps hoping that by giving his demons voice he could silence them.<br /><br />That didn’t work. Hayes eventually died of a drug overdose, as the heart-breaking afterword by Hayes’ brother Geoffrey (also an artist), reminds us.<br /><br />Hayes’ work is not easy to digest or what we tend to traditionally think of as accomplished. But it is visionary and compelling all the same. The guy knew what he was doing.<br /><br />While some cartoonists make art out of the meager talents God gave them, others strive to deliberately be as sloppy and crude as possible.<br /><br />That’s certainly the case with <a href="http://www.lastgasp.com/d/32824/">“Tokyo Zombie,”</a> an uproarious, grotesque manga by Yusaku Hanakuma.<br /><br />Hanakuma is a member of the “Heta-Uma” or “bad, but good” school. Popularized by Japanese artist King Terry, it’s a movement dedicated to drawing as primitively as possible, the better to keep any technical gloss from removing your work’s “soul.”<br /><br />As you might guess from the title, “Tokyo Zombie” is a horror story, albeit with rotting tongue held firmly in cheek.<br /><br />Fujio and Mitsuo are martial arts-addicted tough guys who suddenly find themselves having to kick-punch their way out of a zombie apocalypse brought on by industrial waste buried in a literal mountain of garbage.<br /><br />Circumstances force the pair to separate. Fast forward a few years. Fujio finds himself battling zombies in an arena for the pleasure of the wealthy few who control. What are the odds a zombiefied Mitsuo could show up to battle his old friend? Apparently pretty good.<br /><br />As gory and profoundly silly as “Zombie” is, it’s also a heap of fun, provided you don’t take these sorts of things too seriously. Indeed, hard to imagine a more proficient artist being able to mine as much gold with the material as Hanakuma does here. His art may seem sloppy and primitive at first glance, but it’s always assured.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008</span></span>Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-75879346424561838962008-11-17T14:43:00.003-05:002008-11-17T16:12:50.200-05:00Graphic Lit: Bat-Manga!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SSHeRTgYrdI/AAAAAAAAAtM/xt-iKdh4PF4/s1600-h/kidd_batmanga.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 247px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SSHeRTgYrdI/AAAAAAAAAtM/xt-iKdh4PF4/s320/kidd_batmanga.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5269737427875442130" border="0" /></a><br />Back in 1966 the world was in the grip of an unstoppable force. Batman-fever.<br /> <br />The beloved, campy TV show, starring Adam West and Burt Ward, had transfixed not only America but other countries across the globe, perhaps most surprisingly Japan.<br /> <br />So popular was the caped crusader in the Land of the Rising Sun that Jiro Kuwata, co-creator of the “8 Man” superhero manga and cartoon show, was asked to create some Batman stories for young Japanese readers.<br /> <br />Though Kuwata’s other work is fondly remembered in his native country, these long were thought to have been lost to history. In fact, they were so obscure that Batman’s publisher, DC Comics, wasn’t even aware of their existence.<br /> <br />Enter editor, author and book designer Chip Kidd who, along with collector Saul Ferris, discovered their existence via eBay and set about trying to collect as many of these comics as they could find.<br /> <br />“I had known for many years about Japanese Batman toys from the ’60s, but until about 10 years ago I had absolutely no idea they did their own comics too,” Kidd said. “When I became aware of that I became really, really interested in them.”<br /> <br />That interest has led to <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/graphicnovels/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375425455">“Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan,”</a> an oversized coffee-table book that translates and collects a handful of Kuwata’s stories.<br /> <br />“As a Batman fan who was born in 1964 and grew up with the late ’60s version, to me it was like being a Beatles fan and discovering six new songs,” said Kidd. “These really have a genuine spirit and sense of fun to them that I remember of Batman and Robin back then.”<br /> <br />The stories are both familiar and alien. Kuwata isn’t terribly concerned with mining the traditional Batman mythos or the camp nature of the TV show. There’s no Joker or Penguin here. Or Alfred, Batgirl or Batcave for that matter, although Commissioner Gordon does put in a cameo appearance.<br /> <br />What we get instead are stripped-down but nonetheless thrilling tales of Batman and a noticably younger Robin facing off against some truly noteworthy villains.<br /> <br />As with the traditional Western version, its the villains who make the comic, and “Bat-Manga” features some doozies, such as Professor Gorilla, Go-Go the Magician, Lord Death Man and Dr. Faceless, a disfigured scientist who hates smiling faces so much he even destroys clocks.<br /> <br />“Part of what I like about [the manga] is that, while it is a novelty and the novelty factor is large, [Kuwata] is a really good cartoonist. It’s just beautifully drawn stuff,” Kidd said.<br /> <br />Where Kuwata really shines are in the action sequences, where the dynamic duo leap and swing their way across the page in a truly dizzying fashion.<br /> <br />“There’s this wonderful juxtoposition of whimsy and really eerie, weird scary stuff,” Kidd said. “The fight scenes are truly invigorating.”<br /> <br />Since a lot of this material was tough to find (only two of the stories in the book are complete), Kidd and company opted to simply photograph the pages as is (i.e. yellowed and printed with different colored inks) than clean them up via a scanner.<br /> <br />“I very much wanted to replicate the experience of actually paging through these books,” he said. “When you see a lot of the way vintage manga is collected both in Japan and states, they reduce it to black and white on a crisp white page, and I think that takes away from original experience.”<br /> <br />Though the Batman craze didn’t last long in Japan and Kuwata moved on to other material, he still, as Kidd notes, “did a ton of stuff in a short period of time.”<br /><br />More than enough, he hints, for a second volume.<br /> <br />Keep your bat-fingers crossed.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008</span></span>Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-66056053734010436472008-11-14T14:09:00.004-05:002008-12-19T08:17:25.633-05:00VG review: Guitar Hero World Tour<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SR3Og53_kiI/AAAAAAAAAtE/apxnAEm5c7A/s1600-h/guitar_hero_4_-_at_the_state_fair_png_jpgcopy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SR3Og53_kiI/AAAAAAAAAtE/apxnAEm5c7A/s320/guitar_hero_4_-_at_the_state_fair_png_jpgcopy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5268594203780157986" border="0" /></a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://worldtour.guitarhero.com/us/">“GUITAR HERO WORLD TOUR”</a> <span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />Activision, for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360 and Wii. Rated T for Teen (lyrics, mild suggestive themes), Prices from $49.99 to $189.99.</span><br /><br />It seems unfair to accuse “Guitar Hero World Tour” — the latest sequel in the uber-popular video game franchise — of jumping on the “Rock Band” bandwagon.<br /><br />At the same time, however, there’s no question that it’s taken more than one page from that book. The formerly guitar-only game now allows up to four people to form a virtual band and play drums, vocals and bass as well as lead guitar. Even little tweaks, such as being able to extend your “star power,” seem directly lifted from its competitor.<br /><br />Unfortunately, some of the things that make “Rock Band” so enjoyable aren’t present here. The basic “Guitar Hero” experience remains intact and fans of the series will have fun, but many of the new additions seem unnecessary or flawed.<br /><br />Perhaps the best thing about “World Tour” is the excellent soundtrack, which features well-known tunes by folks like Smashing Pumpkins, REM, Jimmy Eat World, the Eagles and many others.<br /><br />There are a few head-scratchers though. I’ll be hornswoggled if I can figure out what the heck Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” is doing here. Especially when the drum track consists of rapidly hitting the same drum over and over again ad nauseum.<br /><br />Before I talk more about the new instruments, I should mention some of the guitar’s new features. It now boasts a “slider bar” along the neck, and when special transparent buttons appear on the screen, you can slide your finger up and down the neck instead of hitting the strum bar. It’s not as accurate a method though, and results in a lot of missed notes and frustration.<br /><br />The drum kit adds an extra two pads to “Rock Band’s” four. They’re nice and feel more like a real kit, but they’re also a bit quirky. I had to hit them really hard to get them to react and they were very, very loud, making it difficult at times to hear the song.<br /><br />(To Activision’s credit, it has made a drum tuner available for download. Unfortunately for Mac users like myself, it’s PC only.)<br /><br />There are other problems. The menu interface isn’t the best, especially in the band section. It’s hard to tell when you’re playing with friends how well they’re doing. And you can’t bring other players back from failure using star power the way you can in “Rock Band.”<br /><br />The most notable addition in “World Tour” is the ability to use the instruments to record your own tunes and upload them to the Internet. Though it offers a rich variety of tools to mess with, the interface is far from intuitive and you can’t record your own voice or lyrics, making the endeavor somewhat lackluster.<br /><br />Still, “Guitar Hero” offers enough thrills and boasts a strong enough soundtrack to provide enough rock for your buck. There’s little question, however, that “Rock Band” is victor in the battle of the music games. At least for now.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008</span></span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SR3Ogit34cI/AAAAAAAAAs0/vcmDr94RFrw/s1600-h/176369-guitar_hero_world_tour___rebel_yell_super.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SR3Ogit34cI/AAAAAAAAAs0/vcmDr94RFrw/s320/176369-guitar_hero_world_tour___rebel_yell_super.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5268594197563695554" border="0" /></a>Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-14199165984917513682008-11-12T14:55:00.005-05:002008-11-12T15:01:34.319-05:00Graphic Lit: On comic books and the bad economy<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.fantagraphics.com/components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/f4467d8b1b638a8d0457623021cd7b4e.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 500px; height: 614px;" src="http://www.fantagraphics.com/components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/f4467d8b1b638a8d0457623021cd7b4e.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Is the comic book dead?<br /><br />Not comics the artistic medium; that’s never been better.<br /><br />No, I’m talking about the comic book pamphlet. You know, 32 pages, glossy cover, staples in the middle, comes out on a monthly (or semi-monthly) basis? I’m talking about the physical, periodical format.<br /><br />Is it dying?<br /><br />That’s the question that came to my mind while reading <a href="http://www.fantagraphics.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&amp;flypage=shop.flypage&amp;product_id=1502&amp;category_id=556&amp;manufacturer_id=0&amp;option=com_virtuemart&amp;Itemid=62">“Love and Rockets: New Stories,”</a> the latest collection of work by indie cartoonists Jamie, Gilbert and Mario Hernandez.<br /><br />For decades, the brothers have serialized their stories in pamphlets before collecting them into trade paperbacks. Now, however, in an attempt to expand their reach into book stores, the publisher Fantagraphics has rebooted the series as an annual, 112-page graphic novel.<br /><br />“It’s not eliminating the comic shop at all but just opening it up to book stores and any place that can rack books,” said Fantagraphics Director of Promotions Eric Reynolds, “We could have kept [publishing it as a pamphlet], but we saw the way the books sell relative to periodicals and it was kind of a no-brainer.”<br /><br />(By the way “New Stories” is a fantastic collection. Gilbert and Jamie are at the top of their form.)<br /><br />The format change signals a shift of some sort in my mind. There was a time, say, 15 years ago, when you could go into a comic book store on a weekly basis and had a wealth of indie titles to choose from.<br /><br />Now, most of those creators have either abandoned the medium entirely or moved to a “graphic novel only” strategy.<br /><br />“For [‘Love and Rockets’] to switch to book format is a vote of no confidence from guys who were there first in alt-comics market,” said Tom Spurgeon, who runs the Comics Reporter Web site.<br /><br />But is this change exclusive to the small-press scene or will it affect larger publishers as well?<br /><br />I’m not the only one who’s been asking this question. In a recent interview, Dark Horse (publisher of “Hellboy”) CEO Mike Richardson said “As far as pamphlets — especially with what I see happening with the economy — as much as we all love them, the traditional comic book is going to be harder and harder to sell, and harder and harder to make work.”<br /><br />Here are a few reasons:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">An aging fan base. </span>Despite the popularity of films like “Dark Knight,” comic books seem to appeal to a largely older, male readership and there aren’t a lot of new readers coming in.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Emphasis on event-driven titles. </span>Right now, big crossover events like “Final Crisis” and “Secret Invasion” are climbing up the sales charts. But how many times can you return to that “everything changes” well before readers get bored?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The economy.</span> People like to say that comics do well in recessions, but if gas prices go up again or the economy worsens, will fans have to choose between heading to the comic store every week to get the latest issue of “Trinity” versus a trip to the grocery store?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Rising prices.</span> Comics aren’t really disposable entertainment any more. Your average issue runs about $3-$4, and there’s every chance that price could rise even higher.<br /><br />I called a number of local stores to see if the worsening economy had affected them or if they had seen a movement away from periodicals towards graphic novels and trade collections.<br /><br />Most of them said that while they may have lost a customer or two, they haven’t experienced any significant drop in sales.<br /><br />“Pamphlet sales have been up every year for the last six-seven years, even though prices are going up,” said Bill Wahl of Comix Connection in Mechanicsburg, noting that sales of graphic novels also have increased.<br /><br />“The people who have money or credit are still spending. People living paycheck to paycheck are cutting back,” said Bob Newbury of Cosmic Comics in Harrisburg.<br /><br />More significantly, several of them noted that superhero fans in particular felt the need to keep up with their favorite series on a weekly basis.<br /><br />“We sell 40-50 copies of ‘X-Men’ but not a single graphic novel. Fans still want ‘X-Men’ on a weekly basis. There’s not a person waiting to buy it after the story arc is done,” said Ralph Watts of Comics and Paperbacks Plus in Palmyra.<br /><br />And what would the death of the periodical mean for comics shops?<br /><br />“What I tell people is the day that happens, we’re all done. There will be no more comic book stores,” said Newbury. “We need that repeat business.”<br /><br />If you’re DC or Marvel, the periodical remains a viable publishing format, though that’s not necessarily the case for other publishers or genres (DC’s Vertigo line, for example, seems to sell much better in trade than pamphlet).<br /><br />If this trend continues, or if longtime fans are forced to make tough economic choices, the traditional comic book format may go the way of the blacksmith and long-playing record.<br /><br />“Just because something’s outmoded doesn’t mean it should be abandoned,” Spurgeon said. “I hope they don’t abandon it. There’s still money to be made.”<br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008</span></span>Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-50252786997375178992008-11-06T14:58:00.004-05:002008-11-06T15:04:20.533-05:00VG review: Little Big Planet<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SRNNOY-OEAI/AAAAAAAAAsk/_g-P8Wpr-gk/s1600-h/LittleBigPlanet+Screenshot+76.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SRNNOY-OEAI/AAAAAAAAAsk/_g-P8Wpr-gk/s400/LittleBigPlanet+Screenshot+76.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5265637298943168514" border="0" /></a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.littlebigplanet.com/">“LITTLE BIG PLANET”</a> <span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />Sony, for PlayStation 3, rated E for Everyone (comic mischief, cartoon violence), $59.99.</span><br /><br />Few games knock down the wall between developer and player as effectively as “Little Big Planet,” Sony’s big-ticket PlayStation 3 title for the holiday season, does.<br /><br />Sure, lots of other games have offered the chance to manipulate and create your own virtual environment, but I’ve never seen it done as skillfully as it is here. This is one of the most creative and downright attractive video games I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing.<br /><br />At its heart, “Little Big Planet” is a platformer akin to “Super Mario Bros.” and all the other little games that involve hopping around on objects and jumping on the heads of bad guys.<br /><br />Here, you play as an adorable cloth doll known as Sackboy. Sackboy (or girl if you prefer) can run, jump and grab certain items but that’s about it. You don’t gain any special abilities as the game progresses.<br /><br />What you do get is a vibrant, photorealistic world made out of cardboard, cloth, string, switches and just about any other material you can find in real life. More than any game I’ve played before, “Planet” has an almost tactile feel to it, as though I could reach out and touch the objects displayed on my screen.<br /><br />Beyond the look and feel, though, the levels are inspired in their high degree of creativity and challenge. Many times I’d come across a puzzle or objective that would astonish me in its clever design and frustrate me (in a good way) with its difficulty.<br /><br />The main story section is regrettably short, though there’s a lot of replayability through the collection of hidden clothes, stickers and other objects.<br /><br />That’s OK though, because the upside is that you can use those objects to create your own levels in the “My Moon” area. Using a suite of PhotoShoplike tools you can make a level that’s hindered only by your imagination.<br /><br />The tools system is easy and intuitive to manipulate, although the amount of material you have at your disposal is a bit overwhelming, and developing a level that people want to play will take some time and effort on your part.<br /><br />The good news is you can get other people to try out your levels via the Internet. Unfortunately, Sony’s servers were down just about the entire time I was playing the game, but if they come up soon, I can see this being a big part of the game, with fans uploading, sharing and grading their favorite player-created content.<br /><br />My only quibble with the game is that Sackboy doesn’t move around as easily as he’s supposed to. Getting from the foreground to the background (and vice versa) can take repeated tries, and the character doesn’t exactly stop on a dime, which can be treacherous when you’re maneuvering across some high, narrow platforms.<br /><br />Just about every aspect of “Little Big Planet” is pitch-perfect, from the infectious music to the mulitplayer sections to the tutorials narrated by actor Stephen Fry. It’s a joyous, infectious world that I hope to spend lots of time exploring in the near future.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:78%;" >Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SRNNOdba0NI/AAAAAAAAAss/9z8cXhjrRJM/s1600-h/LittleBigPlanet+Screenshot+67.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SRNNOdba0NI/AAAAAAAAAss/9z8cXhjrRJM/s400/LittleBigPlanet+Screenshot+67.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5265637300139380946" border="0" /></a>Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-74406574542468088062008-11-05T14:47:00.002-05:002008-11-05T15:01:29.505-05:00Graphic Lit: The big debut<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.scottmccloud.com/zot/zotcover-big.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 360px; height: 540px;" src="http://www.scottmccloud.com/zot/zotcover-big.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />There’s something about the big debut, that new comic or graphic novel from a budding cartoonist suggesting great promise, that gets people (myself included) all fired up.<br /> <br />Of course, not every artist manages to capitalize on all that initial goodwill, but for those who do, it’s worthwhile to go back and re-examine their initial forays.<br /> <br />Take Scott McCloud, for example.<br /> <br />Before he became renowned for books like “Understanding Comics,” McCloud was best known for his superhero series “Zot!”<br /> <br />The comic centered around the titular hero, a carefree teen from another, futuristic dimension, and his relationship with Jenny, a decidedly more pessimistic girl from our Earth.<br /> <br />The new “Complete Black and White Collection” collects the later half of Zot’s saga (McCloud apparently not being terribly satisfied with its initial full-color run) into one brick-sized book.<br /> <br />Reading the series, you can see McCloud constantly experimenting, taking elements of mainstream comics, the burgeoning indie scene and manga (still new and strange back then) and trying to digest them to form his own style.<br /><br />The first half of the book is mostly set in Zot’s world and is full of fun, zany, dramatic adventures.<br /> <br />Halfway through, McCloud abandons the superhero stuff almost entirely, focusing instead on Jenny and her friends and their everyday lives.<br /> <br />Combining freewheeling sci-fi tropes (robot butlers, flying cars) with realistic, fully developed characters, “Zot!” helped point the way toward comics’ full potential, a trail McCloud would blaze more fully a few years later with “Understanding Comics.”<br /><br />Another series that initially dealt with superheroes only to change halfway through was “Demo,” which initially attempted to tell slice-of-life stories about teens and twentysomethings coming to terms with their burgeoning supernatural powers.<br /> <br />Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan then abandoned that tack in favor of exploring young people at crossroads in their lives, be it the end of a relationship or wising up to the fact that it’s time to grow up and get a real job.<br /> <br />Wood and Cloonan made their mark with these smart, well-grounded, emotionally involving tales, and while they’ve done great work since, I’m not entirely sure they’ve done anything that’s surpassed their early work.<br /><br />But while we might look fondly at “Demo” and “Zot!” with the benefit of hindsight, stellar debuts are far from a thing of the past.<br /> <br />Witness “Swallow Me Whole,” a new graphic novel by Nate Powell. I’m not kidding when I say this book knocked me for a loop.<br /> <br />“Swallow” tells the tale of two teenage stepsiblings, brother and sister, each with different mental problems (the brother displays signs of schizophrenia, while the sister has a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder).<br /> <br />Powell’s tale unfolds in a relaxed fashion as the pair trudge their way through school, deal with family and try to cope with their problems.<br /> <br />Eventually, one sibling starts to get better while the other, tragically, does not.<br /> <br />Powell displays a poetic gift for visual metaphor here, articulating the kids’ illnesses with some deft imagery.<br /> <br />He also has an ear for realistic dialogue and situations (a cringeworthy incident at school, for example, seems particularly drawn from life).<br /> <br />In short, “Swallow Me Whole” is a fantastic book. Keep your eye on this Powell kid. He’s going places.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008</span></span>Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-14380793518699780862008-10-22T15:33:00.024-04:002008-11-04T14:50:27.545-05:00Graphic Lit: An interview with Art Spiegelman<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SRCnZ9pHnbI/AAAAAAAAAsc/e6WPD2wo9p8/s1600-h/SpiegelmanBREAKDOWNS.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 229px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SRCnZ9pHnbI/AAAAAAAAAsc/e6WPD2wo9p8/s320/SpiegelmanBREAKDOWNS.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5264892028881706418" border="0" /></a><br />It's no exaggeration to say that Art Spiegelman legitimized comics.<p> While he certainly wasn't alone, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist has been a tireless advocate of the art form and played a large part in shepherding its movement toward respectability.</p><p> But arguably nothing he did was as influential as <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/graphicnovels/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679406419"><span style="font-style: italic;">Maus</span></a>. His haunting retelling of his father's experiences in Auschwitz (with the Jews disguised as mice and the Germans disguised as cats)<br />helped many to see that comics could be more than superheroes and kiddie fare.</p><p> Now Spiegelman has a new book, <a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/graphicnovels/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375423956">Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&amp;*!</a> It's actually a reprinting of a little-seen collection of early experimental strips that in many ways laid the groundwork for <span style="font-style: italic;">Maus</span>. He spoke from his home in New York City about <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns </span>and his legacy: </p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: What’s it like to revisit this material after so long?</span><br /><br />A: Well, that’s what led to that 20-plus page part of the book was trying to understand what it mean to revisit it. What’s interesting for me is it doesn’t seem like juvenalia to me.<br /><br />That’s the question being asked by my friends, “Doesn’t it feel weird to be showing work from whatever number of years ago?” And it does if I feel to directly attached to it. I’ll go “Oh gee, I really better redraw that part. It’s not right.”<br /><br />I’ve been very proud of some of the achievements in the old <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns</span>. They’re as important to me as the whole Maus book thing. They were wrested out of nowhere. They were coming out of a context of no context as one of those New Yorker writers used to put it. I look back on those as landmarks for myself and -- it may be hard to say it about oneself but landmarks as to what kinds of comics could be made afterward, even though I didn’t have the facility of a Robert Crumb or the intense madness of a Rory Hayes or whatever. It was offering something new.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Aside from the obvious — the initial </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Maus </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">story and </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Prisoner on the Hell Planet</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> — to what extent did these stories shape the structure and story of </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Maus</span><span style="font-weight: bold;">?</span><br /><br />A: Good question, cause I think it was essential. It’s not just a matter of the subject matter which is clearly urgently connected to <span style="font-style: italic;">Maus</span>. Three-page <span style="font-style: italic;">Maus</span>, one hundred-page <span style="font-style: italic;">Maus</span>, you can see that there’s a link-up. But I think that the other material, ones where I found different ways of connecting panels and making your eyeball stutter, skip, jump and bounce in order to try to understand something.<br /><br />Now the way I was doing it in <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns </span>was guaranteed to find me a very small if any audience, cause it was offering difficulties from a medium that was there to make things easy. On the other hand, all the things I was tinkering with to make you stumble and re-read, could be put together as a kind of Tinkertoy set, but rearranged so that instead of making your eyeball stutter it made your eyeball move. It was the same instruction kit, just putting it from Z to A rather than A to Z or whatever.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Looking at </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Breakdowns </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">and then reading </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Maus </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">I can definitely see there’s a lot of the same experimentalism going on, it’s just more in service to —</span><br /><br />A: It’s just totally hit and miss. I remember at the time I was reading a lot about Picasso in the 70s, which is what led to that <span style="font-style: italic;">Ace Hole</span> comic strip. There’s a postwar issue of Life magazine where somebody said “What’s the big deal about Picasso? All painters do that except usually they finish their damn paintings.” (laughs)<br /><br />That kind of impulse of "everything is here but it’s got to be finished so that people will be able to read it." On the surface it’s out of the way, but the way pages were thought about was very similar. It was just with the acknowledgment that people don’t want to think about the stories they enter into completely as a mere armature or hanger to drape something on. The reason they’ve come to the show in the first place perhaps.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Can you tell me a bit about your influences on this material. You talk in the book about expressionist art and Picasso. What were you looking at the time —</span><br /><br />A: You mean outside of comic books.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: And comic books too. The whole package.</span><br /><br />A: Comics were my culture period. And then I came late to thinking about other things as worth looking at. I was almost like a slob snob. Certain things were exempt. As soon as I saw <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Grosz">George Grosz’s</a> work I thought “Oh, he’s a cartoonist and he’s a good one.” That was easy. It was one step harder to get to Picasso and several steps harder to get to ultimately people like Ad Reinhardt or Pollack or whatever.<br /><br />There was a moment where I seemed to understand why they were doing that sort of thing and it wasn’t just to con me, which was the original paranoid thought. It’s better to think of politicians that way than painters.<br /><br />In literature Kafka I got right away. It was just an extension of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Twilight Zone </span>as I think I said in the introduction. But some of the other stuff, I think Gertrude Stein became important to me. I’ve returned to find it impenetrable, but there was a period where it was very clear. Reading James Joyce. Reading relatively difficult literature as well as my passionate embrace of Philip K. Dick at the time. Loving the noir-novels for their sentences than their stories.<br /><br />These things sit in different proportions now. At this point, Philip K. Dick, well that’s a no-brainer. If you’ve ever heard of science fiction, that’s him. For me it was strictly finding a very obscure paperback that had a blurb on the cover that said “World gone mad and only a cartoonist can save them,” which fit in with my own messianic needs. It turned out the blurb writer only read the first ten sentences of the novel and thought that was what it might be about. Nobody ever knows what those books are about. But at that time that wasn’t an obvious taste. Nor was the noir stuff, which is now looming as I think one of the main genre achievements of the last century.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: What specifically led you to go down this experimental format? As you mention you were kind of alone in this. Your contemporaries were not doing this sort of thing.</span><br /><br />A: It was like “Oh, here’s a whole other continent. While they’re colonizing that one, here’s another one!” The revolution in what could be handled in comics content was already well under way with Crumb and Justin Green and even the Furry Freak Brothers because all of the sudden Dagwood Bumstead was smoking weed. There was a content revolution definitely going on.<br /><br />The thing was hanging out, not just with cartoonists, but really with underground filmmakers. In San Francisco there was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Kuchar">George Kuchar</a>, but in New York there was this guy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Jacobs">Ken Jacobs</a> who gets this special tribute, a set of panels, in the first part of the book. These were people who grew out of a much more rarefied — they were looking at stuff that was much more difficult. Not for sissy eyes, you know?<br /><br />It took me awhile to get into it. I’d fall asleep at most of their film screenings cause there was no story. They came to film like abstract expressionists came to painting. Ken Jacobs was a student of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Hoffman">Hans Hoffman</a>.<br /><br />It became clear to me at a certain moment that comics didn’t get to do the same kind of extending and growing that a lot of other mediums in the 20th century did. Why not? One of the reasons is that comics is one of the only ones that stuck with figure drawing at a time when it became really square to draw something representational. Comics were left alone to carry that mantle, but as a result they missed out on a lot of modernism. I was getting interested in modernism at the time, so it seemed natural to try to see what can comics do if they want to enter the same conversation. So that’s what led to that kind of work.<br /><br />For me, because I’m a cartoonist, I wasn’t interested in something that I would argue about with these friends of mine all the time, which is that I think they saw communication as a nasty word. We’re not here to communicate. What do you mean? We are the "arteest." We are the shaman. We spread our entrails and others read them. I went to a commercial art high school. I was trained to become an advertising artist if I just didn’t have a contrarian ethical streak I could have made out as one of those mad men in the early '60s.<br /><br />Communication per se was the natural province. I just thought maybe you could change where the communication took place. What are you communicating about? Is it urgent or is it just one more sublimated sexual fantasy, which is the way it was until they stopped being sublimated in the '60s, or is it just one more joke — nothing wrong with jokes. It was like changing the kind of conversation one could have and the thing seemed a miscalculation at the time but now seems more reasonable. One could change the demand one put on the reader to make that communication happen. That line changed, where that gate is.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: Yeah, it definitely feels like there’s more of a blending than ever before.</span><br /><br />A: But it’s not like I feel comics shouldn’t communicate, because I think they should! That’s what we’re on the planet for. Yes, self-expression is communication as well. It’s not trying to mystify and keep people out. It’s a matter of just having a conversation that can’t take place without some vocabulary.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: You talk about this in the afterword, but can you just take me again through the publication history?</span><br /><br />A: Oh god. The book came about only because I was doing comics that were easy to miss. I was doing short pieces, very concentrated, that sometimes would take me months, literally to do a page. In order to write that one-page poem I either had to learn Urdu or invent some other language to make that page. It took longer than just writing and drawing a page.<br /><br />After I had done a number of those things I wanted to see them in their own context. It made me want some kind of collection of my own work and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Gelman">Woody Gelman</a> at Topps Gum thought he was going to win the sweepstakes and had a lot of extra mad money for publishing and was inviting all of — this isn’t short it’s just fast — this guy offered me a chance to do a book. He was a small publisher who thought he was going to make a lot of money.<br /><br />By the time he realized he was not going to make a lot of money publishing an Elvis Presley poster book my book was at the printer. Fortunately, one of the people I knew who was a porno publisher of dirty comics was willing to put this out even though he didn’t get it himself. I learned at that moment if not before that there really is a difference between printing and publishing. He helped me get the book printed but it never really entered the world. It was "privished" rather than published.<br /><br />So this thing came out. It took a long time to sell what turned out to be only 3,500 or 4,000 copies after we threw away the ones that came out badly printed when the all-night shift at the printer got so interested in those erotic panels that they stopped looking at the presses.<br />There were relatively few. 4,000’s not a giant edition. It took a rather long time for those to feed out into the world. A number of those strips within <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns </span>did get printed and reprinted over the years. A lot of people did get to see the individual pieces of it.<br /><br />At that point I thought that was it. I moved on and actually there it lay as one of the many odd evolutionary sports a hardcover, large size anthology of comics that didn’t seem to come either from a fine-art world or a comics world. It only came out as a book now because of things that happened on Sept. 11, which got me to want to make comics after we were in lower Manhattan for the festivities. The comics I was making then for some newspapers in Europe were things I was just doing to keep myself occupied while waiting to die in lower Manhattan.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: You’re talking about </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/graphicnovels/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375423079">In the Shadow of No Towers</a>.</span><br /><br />A: Yeah. And I really wasn’t ever expecting that to become a book entitled <span style="font-style: italic;">In the Shadow of No Towers</span>. I was just making pages. I wasn’t going to leave New York, I had vowed to make comics again. There was no reason for me to make comics again where I place the contractual connection between reader and me so far over to the side that I would be hampered in putting down what I needed to put down. When it did come out as a book and people started talking to me inevitably I’d start talking about the work I’d done in <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns </span>prior to <span style="font-style: italic;">Maus</span>. It was at that time that my editor at Pantheon said “What’s this <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns </span>thing?” I showed it to him, he said Hey, we could publish this, it’s great.”<br /><br />I was kind of shocked and glad, but first of all, as I relate in that essay at the end, I said “but what about these hardcore sexual panels” and he says “the naughty stuff?” Time has passed me by, I don’t know. I said "Yeah sure, if you want to publish it that will be great, I’ll just do an introduction" and then I realized I had vowed to return to comics after Sept. 11. So over two years later I have a 20-page introduction and therefore was able to re-contextualize the book a bit.<br /><br />Because the first question you asked me is the one that the whole project is about. Looking back at that thing, what led to those weird bits in terms of their content and the peculiar interest they took in form. I thought this was a way to revisit that and make good on one concept I had in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns </span>years that I tried hard to realize and it just didn’t work. In the back part there’s that thing called <span style="font-style: italic;">Some Boxes for the Salvation Army</span>. And that’s where I was excited about the possibility of editing a comic after you drew it, which meant making all the boxes the same size. I tried to do that for Arcade the magazine I was co-editing with Bill Griffith. Time ran out, the issue was due and I only made enough panels of the same size to barely last three minutes. Certainly not enough to do what I ambitiously wanted to do.<br /><br />Those got published as some scrap and I moved on. But I was wistful because that was a good idea and I wanted to revisit it. This became an occasion to use that formal idea again — instead of the page being a unit, making the box the unit, so that the boxes could be 3,5,7, 15, 20, it didn’t matter wherever it ended something else would connect to it. It allowed me to set up different kinds of rhythms, repetitions, moving back and forth in time, and echo something about the way memory works and how conceptual things inter-cut with the memories and make other things happen. So that project became really exciting and I got to do a comic I was supposed to have done back in the '70s now. It was interesting for me to see how it connected to the work I did after.<br /><br />In a way that long introduction is more friendly than some of the work that’s in the '70s <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns</span>, in terms of beckoning someone close enough to spend time with it. Because I’ve learned something about how to pace and tell an anecdote. It fell somewhere between what I was doing in <span style="font-style: italic;">Maus </span>and what I had been doing in <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns</span>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Reading the material, in some ways I think it’s more revealing and personal than <span style="font-style: italic;">Maus</span>.</span><br /><br />A: Thank you for saying that, because I’m just beginning to have to talk about this thing and I’m realizing how hard it is for me, because I’m vulnerable here.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: It’s extremely vulnerable material. I was actually kind of shocked at some of the sequences, how revealing and personal you were. I hate to compare it to </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Maus</span><span style="font-weight: bold;">, but maybe it’s because it’s taken out of the realm of world history to an extent.</span><br /><br />A: Certainly the anecdotes were personal. That’s true. Those are anecdotes that were anecdotable. They weren’t the most wispy, visceral aspects of memory. They were the ones that one could tell someone else should one want to. You have some memories like “and then there’s the time five kids gathered after school and beat the shit out of me” and there’s others where you’re just feeling this horror at what it is to have to get through life and turn into an adult, but there’s no content. It’s just a feeling of horror.<br /><br />That wasn’t what I was trying to communicate. I was thinking of the ones that were anecdotable and seeing what happens when you put those together in different temporal order and different emotional order and different stylistic order to see how they could fit together and give a overall feeling.<br /><br />The other part that’s personal is the actual stuff that I'm just calling formal comics or an interest in structure. In a way that’s as personal as the content. Cause that’s the one where it’s about the kind of electrical impulses that carry thought rather than what the thought is. That’s rather intimate in the sense that it’s not as easy to talk about or demo as the content and yet it’s the one that’s about how I think. I just don’t know what to say. It seems really basic to me.<br /><br />The page called <span style="font-style: italic;">Don’t Get Around Much Any More</span>. OK, there’s some content there, it’s about feeling bummed out, depressed. But the actual way that content is expressed has to do with the ways in which the usual Tinkertoys have been arranged. And that rearrangement makes me experience the feelings that are being described when I talk about being depressed. But that’s more than just saying “I was really depressed, my girlfriend left me, or whatever.”<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: You’re talking about trying to evoke a particular mood or emotion through the comic rather than simply issue a statement or go from a to b.</span><br /><br />A: Right. It’s not just the content or parts of the comic. It’s the very way that comic is built. Is carrying the most urgent part of it for me. What I was describing before was trying to invent some new version of Urdu to be able to do a short strip. But those are the works that made me want this book to happen again because I’d like that to be re-entered into the mix even though it’s not likely that it can have the kind of audience that will go “Ah, I don’t know if I like this guy’s comics. I don’t read comics, but it’s about the Holocaust! And there’s this other thing about Sept. 11 and I was watching TV that morning.” So there’s some reason. Here it’s much more out there on it’s own terms. I don’t know what that means in the world but it does feel like it’s more intimate in that sense.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: It doesn’t necessarily have the hook to draw you in. How long did it take you to put the introduction together?</span><br /><br />A: It was done over a period over two years. I keep doing other things of one kind or another at the same time, so it’s not like every day I come marching in with the same agenda until I get to the last panel. But a lot of my time was devoted to that. There was footage I didn’t use, there were a lot of sequences that didn’t make the final cut. There’s a lot of just trying to figure out how to do this thing. Sometimes things that looked like they should have been easy, even to me, took a long time to master something stupid and simple that anybody should be able to do if they call themselves a cartoonist.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Like what?</span><br /><br />A: There’s one sequence about the <span style="font-style: italic;">Dick Van Dyke Show</span>. That drove me nuts. I knew what drawing style I wanted but it wasn’t anywhere near the vocabulary of drawing styles that I’m usually interested in. So sometime around 1960 or so there was a style called off-beat. It grew out of that <span style="font-style: italic;">Tom Terrific</span>, Gene Deitch thing. It was moving toward a sort of advertising look and it always looked to me soulless even though it came from people like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Deitch">Gene Deitch</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_Partch">Virgil Partch</a>. It came from a genuine interest in what people like Picasso and Paul Klee were doing when they were drawing. but by the time it entered the world of subway poster advertisements and stuff, it was about the most soulless kind of cartooning I could find.<br /><br />So I had to find some way of approximating what that stuff was for me, because first of all, that’s exactly the stuff that was around at that moment, whatever year that anecdote was. At that time that style was definitely in the ascendancy, and I wanted it for that reason and also because it was about how that artificial humor stuff cracks up against something all too real and looks as artificial as it is. Canned laugh tracks and stuff. I need to make that thing look that way and it took me a long time to do that even though, what is it, like six panels or something.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: I think it’s about nine.</span><br /><br />A: Oh good, so I got about half as much mileage as I thought.<br /><br />I wasn’t trying to do these things as <span style="font-style: italic;">Exercise in Style</span> Matt Madden pages let’s say. But I needed each sequence to be thought through in its own complete little world that I could hook up to the world next door. Sometimes it was more like Milton Caniff like, other times like 1930s cartooning and other times more anonymous.<br /><br />Did you ever see the movie <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054963/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Hands of Orlac</span>?</a> It was this alien hand that you can’t control anymore. Some days the hand can move and pretend it’s a cartoonist’s and some days it doesn’t know what to do with a pencil or how it fits between what fingers. This allowed for that because I could move onto another one where a drawing style was more congenial and then go back.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Not to harp on it, but the intro does feel more intimate, perhaps because you’re talking about your childhood or because you’re less overt in talking about the influence that the Holocaust continues to have on you and your family.</span><br /><br />A: Well <span style="font-style: italic;">Maus </span>was more in service of what you were talking about before which was where does history intersect with a personal story. This one, there’s still the smell of the ovens somewhere in the background, but I’m trying to deal with a more banal life, presumably like the ones my comics reader friends would have had as well.<br /><br />That’s what I was trying to get at before when I said about anecdotable. Even though I was using my own memory, my memories are different from anyone else’s specific memories, I wasn’t interested in my memories as I was in the model of how memories work. I was using things that one could relate to even if one had different experiences.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: Tell me a little bit about the Toon Book <a href="http://www.toon-books.com/book_jack_about.php"><span style="font-style: italic;">Jack in the Box</span></a>.</span><br /><br />A: It’s funny because in a way that was coming at things from the exact opposite side of the highway. So here’s this one book that is made for adults willing to re-read. Because most of these things weren’t made to be read once and put aside, like, say, <span style="font-style: italic;">Garfield</span>. They’re meant to be re-read and the only way to re-read is you start doing it once and then have to go back and eventually make all of these connections that I hope are to be found.<br /><br />At the same moment, I’m working on something that will get kids to learn to read so they can re-read. And it’s coming exactly from some other side except the same issues were at stake, which is a lot of my stuff, even <span style="font-style: italic;">Maus</span>, comes at more formal interest than a content interest. Obviously I am aching with the burdens of history that have been laid on my back when I was just trying to watch TV, but still the thing that made me do the book was not that, but "Ooo, a long comic that need a bookmark. That would be cool."<br /><br />Most of the pieces in <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns </span>are easily identifiable as exactly that. On the other side there’s you want to make a comic that’s so qualified a kid who would otherwise be reading "See Dick Run" would be reading this, that it would feel richer. I was like that guy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Perec">Georges Perec</a> who wrote a whole novel without the letter E in it. That kind of limitation.<br /><br />Here the limitation was the word list — words you’re supposed to know by the end of first grade. And I was starting from that the same way those "I Can Read Books," the Dr. Seuss books start from that list. On the other hand, the work for adults was coming from another set of self-imposed restrictions and limitations.<br /><br />It grew very specifically out of the difficulty I had writing the essay at the end. There was a certain point where I realized it’s just too hard to say this stuff about yourself. It’s much easier to have professor so and so or a friend write about you and that functions as the essay. But I felt for this book I needed to do it. It was so hard I just gave up after awhile. There was a moment where I figured I’ll just get some art critic friend to blather on for some pages. I’ll give him the necessary data. And while I was at that point of giving up, Francoise is making this series of books that sounds really like a solid thing to do in the world. And that was sort of a vacation from butting my head against the wall of writing an essay about myself.<br /><br />There’s this one strip in <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns </span>called <span style="font-style: italic;">Cracking Jokes</span>, which Scott McCloud acknowledges as "Oh, you can make comics as an essay, I see." That particular strip, in the very first panel there’s a jack in the box with dicks hanging off of his jester’s cap. There’s a reference to the notion of the jack in the box as a way of overcoming fear and learning the pleasures of narrative.<br /><br />In a way the jack in the box is the first story. the first time you’re willing to trust your imagination enough to take a little excursion, even if it’s a little freaky the first time around. You understand it won’t really hurt you so you get to put the jack in the box back in and anticipate happily that the little puppet will pop out again. That’s the essence of what gets people to get interested in stories that play with your anxieties and then release them. Right? I wanted that to be part of this comic, the jack in the box keeps coming out in a more scary way until he’s literally outside the box and behind the boy. I thought it would be a way of offering something — the book itself would become a metaphor for a jack in the box.<br /><br />Did you have an actual physical copy to look at?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Of <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns</span>? Yes. </span><br /><br />A: Good, because I was unhappy to find out that most people, unlike you, you must work for a paper with clout, there’s very few of these until this week. They’re on a boat somewhere. It took forever to get them here. As a result people are looking at the pdf version. And printing them out god knows how. And the objectness of it is part of what it is. The cover of the '70s Breakdowns is a different weight of paper than the —<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: You need to see it in the full color version.</span><br /><br />A: There’s shifting paper stocks, in terms of the weight of the paper and the color of the paper, so you can describe that but it’s not the same as viscerally touching it.<br /><br />I think that’s part of why comics are doing so well in book stores now. Most literature this point, if it isn’t already on the Kindle — I touched it once — seems like it will get there. It’s not that beautiful a machine. It looks like it was made in East Germany. The content works. You can pour various books in and read them. But you can’t pour comics in.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: At least not these kind of comics, certainly.</span><br /><br />A: Even when they get to the point where they can print in color, part of what’s true now, generally, is the comics are some of the best designed books in book stores. They take advantage of their existence as an object.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: You’re regarded in the comics community as the “father of the art comics movement. Not just for </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Maus </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">but for the role you and Francoise played in shepherding and proselytizing cartoonists in </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Raw </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">magazine. Forgive me for using the term, but you’re seen as this father figure. Is that a role you’re at all comfortable with?</span><br /><br />A: Not at all, because I know a lot about father figures. The first thing you gotta do is kill ‘em! Absolute first order of business. I didn’t read all of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Comics-Graphic-Novels-Work/dp/0306815095">Douglas Wolk’s book</a> when I saw one sentence that somebody showed me about my work that said he has to be cut down because he’s the largest poppy in the field. Something close to that. I’m thinking, wait a minute, I know nothing about opium farming but I know a lot about Freud and Poppy. Cut down. Poppy. I get it. There’s definitely some kind of castrate the father figure as quick as you can. I don’t know.<br /><br />I feel like I’m still one of the tyros trying to learn the basics of a trade that some of my younger peers in their 30s have gotten under control rather easily. I have a very difficult time drawing. It never got easier. I’m still struggling with all that, but as far as being the father figure, I wish that weren’t the case.<br /><br />I think what happened was I was just following my own nose and interests from a very early age. Back in the 70s it seemed very obvious to me that certain things were true like comics could be art. They don’t have to be, they can be propaganda, they can be pornography. And of course, certain kids of pornography and propaganda can themselves be art. But nevertheless, comics can be any old thing it’s just a medium. And I was interested in seeing whether I could get the same stuff into and out of comics that I was getting from other corners of the culture band.<br /><br />That led to certain things like finding other people’s work that seemed to fit into that logic system and then making <span style="font-style: italic;">Raw </span>with Francoise, at the time that was a band of outsiders. The artists in there were not on any easy to find a common denominator. It wasn’t even as specific as when we did Arcade where it was mostly San Francisco cartoonists. It was just trolling for people pushing at certain kids of edges.<br /><br />Over the years, especially in the last few, it seems like those are the artists who are in the main tent now. Gary Panter and I had some kind of public conversation where we were talking about Chris Ware and said it was like a one-man <span style="font-style: italic;">Raw</span>. It did open up a certain kind of zone. It was always with the understanding that it wasn’t the only zone.<br /><br />I think some of the father figure resentment and anger at me, which sometimes scares the hell out of me really, is that it’s as if I was saying — you used the word proselytize. Proselytize usually means if you don’t believe in my religion you’re going to go to hell. I never had that attitude. I was just talking about what moved me. Stuff I liked. I wasn’t saying therefore you can’t like superheroes. You can do whatever the hell you want. If you hate my work and love Kirby’s work that’s fine. But there’s no reason for me to talk about work I don’t like, there’s so much I do.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: Well, you’re someone who has straddled the line between high and low art, especially in works like <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns</span>. And there seems to be a reluctance on the part of a lot of cartoonists and fans to view comics as high art. What are the dangers — </span><br /><br />A: That’s a decent question. I think that’s why I was trying to talk about the communication arts, those things that are considered lowly. I don’t think writers have the same kinds of problems. Maybe certain poets. For the most part a person sits down to write a novel, they do their damnedest to make it rich, full of all they know and if not exactly entertain the same way a James Bond movie entertains, it will pull you in and give you something you can follow along with. The idea is not to see how many people you can get to not finish your book. By being involved in narrative they have a less problematic relationship to the notion of communicating.<br /><br />One of the problems with some comics is when one is specifically going after the mystification that seems to surround certain aspects of painting — “This is a painting. You figure out why I painted it and you figure out where it sits inside the grand philosophical stream of what painting has been." That can get pretty goddamn dry. I really wasn’t after that. I wasn’t after dry. I wasn’t after drowning you in a sea either. It was really just trying to make a different kind of experience happen.<br /><br />Right now I’m reading lots and lots of very old comic books because they’ve been uploaded. You’ve probably come across <a href="http://goldenagecomics.co.uk/">Golden Age Comics</a>. I’ve been taking a lot of books down from there because I’ll never see them otherwise. 99.9 percent of it was real sludge. Really hard to plow through and sometimes it’s got a nice visual lick. But every once in a while you run across someone who’s going for broke. Certainly Krigstein was applying all of his intelligence to making that thing happen. Other people had a strong personality. At this point I have a renewed respect for John Stanley as I discover more of what wasn’t Little Lulu stuff I had grown up with and taken for granted.<br /><br />One of the thing with Kurtzman was the whole anarchic project of making those war and humor comics, but part of what he was doing was finding a usable grammar for structuring a page. I find that really a pleasure to try to understand because it seems like a conscious effort on his part. There’s one thing he does where it’s three panels across with a progressive close-up. And that allows for certain kinds of visual beats to happen. I read somewhere several years ago that if he had three lines of text above the box in one panel he had to keep that the same in all three so you wouldn’t have different sized rectangles. That kind of thing of really thinking about how it all fits together on a page; I really like seeing that secret language. The stuff Picasso left visible because it wasn’t finished is part of the way certain cartoonists approach what they do and it’s really exciting for me to find it again and understand what they were thinking. Certain artists who were moving to the same frequencies with a larger obligation to make sure that one way or another it’s going to entertain those kiddies. Sometimes dealing with relatively dark materials.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: Getting back to your influence again, you wrote what is largely considered to be the Great American Graphic novel. I get the feeling frequently — and you mention it in <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns </span>— that you are very ambivalent about its success.</span><br /><br />A: Well, yeah. On the one hand, I’m grateful. There it is. It’s obviously going to be the first line in my obituary. So there’s that. And sure, it’s great to have that.<br /><br />On the other hand it weighs, not only on me, but I think it weighs on all these other cartoonists trying to make work as well. “Oh god, <span style="font-style: italic;">Maus </span>is such a burden.” Not just for me but for the ones saying “But superheroes are good.” Or the ones saying “This a serious story so it’s going to have to go one on one with <span style="font-style: italic;">Maus</span>.” It looms. Obviously it looms larger for me because I’m standing right next to the giant Vladek monument that’s portrayed [in <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns</span>].<br /><br />It’s not like I necessarily need to make another long comic that needs a bookmark. If anything I’m wondering if I want any aspect of that paternity laid on me. Because there’s one thing that’s definitely part of what’s in both the introduction to <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns </span>and in the older work which is comics as an act of great compression. The idea of a drawing to me is not to make an Alex Ross painting in a comic book. It’s never been a goal. I don’t like looking at it. It’s very skillful but it has nothing to do with me.<br /><br />But I am interested in highly compressed visual information, what can be fit into a box and be readable and make it composed well. It involves relatively simple marks. That’s what made me want to do comics to begin with. When I was getting that cartooning kit at the age of seven or so. Also the language has to be very compressed, literally, in order to make balloons that are not just insanely tedious, twelve lines of balloon dialogue for each box. It’s an act of real compression there. It’s an act of compression for me.<br /><br />It’s interesting to me that some people will do comics in which somebody is going down a flight of stairs for twelve pages but unless it’s really about the staircase, it seems to me it’s like watching somebody knit. Staircase, you’ve gotta get on it, you’ve gotta get off it. I think that’s two boxes. And it could be there’s a reason, I’m not saying there can’t be a reason. But very often there isn’t a reason except that the artist is very patient and willing to draw a subway from twelve different perspectives as the guy’s riding uptown and it takes as a real subway ride would take.<br /><br />I’m more interested in that kind of compressed storytelling. In a way I think <span style="font-style: italic;">Maus </span>is an act of compressed storytelling, event though it is about 300 pages. But if I was approaching it with some of the rhythms of other work I’m seeing coming out now, it would have been 1,200 pages. So not everything requires that breadth of paper to make it happen. It seems to me it has uses in terms of marketing. It’s nice to be able to fall into one long work. But in terms of making, it doesn’t necessarily seem like it uses what comics do best.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: What do you make of the resurgent interest in comics these days? Do you look around and think “I had a hand in that?”</span><br /><br />A: Well sure. I’m proud of that as well. I think it’s great what’s happening because by making that landscape more visible to people and beckoning people towards it, it allows room for all the Johnny Ryans of the world as well. All of the wiseguy cartoonists who are all about shit, piss and id. Their outlaw culture is closer to graffiti than wall art. Bad example because graffiti crossed over, but you know what I mean.<br /><br />The thing is that can happen once theirs a grid that includes an audience, and this new audience has to come along with the notion that oh, one doesn’t have to cast aside childish things, one can just let those toys grow up as well. That’s a great thing.<br /><br />On the other hand, my more pessimistic side sees it as one more fad in a medium that has a history of fadness.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: That was my next question, do you think it’s sustainable?</span><br /><br />A: Well I don’t think it will ever go back to the darkest days of 1980, when there was this total, arid landscape around us. But it will certainly settle down because when you look at it, it’s like the Yellow Kid became a fad, used to sell stuff, seeds to plant, tobacco and whatever. And that encouraged more stuff which soon became, there must have been about 40 different anarchistic kids dynamiting their parents in between 1898 and 1915 or so. It was a fad. And in an ongoing way, each of these landmark strips set off endless things like them. Things that looked like Terry and the Pirates were everywhere after Terry and the Pirates or — this is more scholarly than you need — but when Roy Crane got it going.<br /><br />But certainly with comic books the same thing happens. After Superman there’s thousands of trannies in the area. And I think in a way the graphic novel’s following in that great tradition. There were horror comics, there were teen comics, now there’s long comics. I think it will all find it’s place eventually, but now at least there’s something happened. Comics won the trifecta.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: What do you make of the manga boom? It seems like it’s a part of what you’re talking about and at the same time very separate.</span><br /><br />A: Yeah. What I was thinking of was that the trifecta consists of these things that happened but weren’t directly connected simultaneously. The manga boom? My jury is out because I’m not all that interested in — I get restless. I haven’t found a thing that would take me from beginning to end of a long thing happily.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Have you read any of [Osama] Tezuka’s work?</span><br /><br />A: Yeah and I like that best. I read the <a href="http://www.vertical-inc.com/books/buddha/buddha_top.html">Buddha book</a> and liked it because I was so surprised. It would go from slapstick to philosophy to violence and pathos, careening through. I didn’t know what to make of it because the cultural contexts didn’t make it clear whether that was the norm or this was strictly someone who needed better meds.<br /><br />I liked the Buddha books. I like some of the Phoenix stuff. The guy I really, really like and would love to read more of in English is this guy named <a href="http://lambiek.net/artists/t/tsuge_yoshiharu.htm">Yoshiharu Tsuge</a>, who we published decades ago. He’s not receptive to the idea of it being translated, so most of its impossible unless you find scantillations, but he’s as good as Tezuka even in the eyes of japanese comics scholars.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Q: He’s the guy who did<span style="font-style: italic;"> Screw Style</span>?</span><br /><br />A: Yeah. There’s that and then there’s some more autobiographical stuff, some of which came out in Raw. We did one about an electroplate factory and one about a girl’s first menstruation called Flowers. Those have a kind of — they at first seemed decompressed, but then you find out just how amazingly compressed they’ve been, especially the autobiographical stuff. He’s really been great, and at some point some Japanese artist was explaining to me that there’s the two great mountains of manga which Tezuka and Tsuge, even though Tsuge produced a total, he’s almost as unprolific as me by Japanese standards. He only made 800 or 10,000 pages as opposed to Tezuka’s 20 billion.<br /><br />But I am interested in it. Certainly I’m interested in seeing that here’s something that unlike whatever we call it — art comics, independent comics, underground comics — there’s something else happening here which is comics as real entertainment the way they were when comics were at the center of the media pile. Specifically it was the ones for girls that made it all happen because they were so neglected that they were even willing to read from right to left.<br /><br />There’s another thing that ties in which is the movies and comics business now. I think there it’s more the content of comics is migrating over to film and its because it’s no longer necessary to draw a person flying if you want to see a person flying. It’s readily available software. In a way the one franchise comics still had back in the '50s is no longer theirs alone. As a result, a lot of comics just seem like storyboards for film projects. It’s not directly connected with the alternative comics or the manga thing but it’s a third way in which comics have entered into high visibility.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: What are you working on now?</span><br /><br />A: Right this minute before I go on a book tour that’s making me quake, I’m doing something for <a href="http://www.mcsweeneys.net/">McSweeney’s.</a> The people at McSweeney’s wanted to do a more stand-alone version of that sketchbook. They said let’s expand it and I said well, there’s only about two more drawings you didn’t publish, so how do we do that? After a bit of stumbling around what I’m doing is the hardcover edition of that sketchbook plus two other sketchbooks from different periods in their own format and size. They’ll be bundled together with something that looks like a book strap and a booklet about the sketchbooks. There’s one from '79 when I was starting <span style="font-style: italic;">Maus</span>. one from 83 at the height of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Raw </span>years and the one you just saw as a bundle of books and I’m just trying to get it all done before the book tour.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Wow. When’s that coming out?</span><br /><br />A: I think as early as February. And it will be called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Be-Nose-Art-Spiegelman/dp/1934781142"><span style="font-style: italic;">Be a Nose</span></a>. One book called <span style="font-style: italic;">Be</span>, one book called <span style="font-style: italic;">A</span>, one book called <span style="font-style: italic;">Nose</span>. There’s a movie called Bucket of Blood, a Roger Coreman cheapie horror comedy from about 1960 in which this guy named Walter Paisley who works at a beatnik coffee shop and realizes he’s not getting any of the girls, the painters and poets are. So he tries to be an artist. At the beginning of the movie he’s got this giant lump of clay and he’s pounding at it, trying to make it into something and he’s saying “Be a nose! Be a nose!” and he gets really frustrated and throws the knife he’s working with across the room and it accidentally kills his cat. He puts the cat in plaster and it’s his sculpture. The girls like his sculpture, it’s called “dead cat” and the girl goes "oh, that’s a cool title" and he gets the beatnik girls.<br /><br />That thing pounding helplessly going "be a nose" is how I feel my creative process works. and the sketchbooks are a doorway into that process.<br /><br />That’s what I’m working on at this very second. And then a larger scale I’m thinking about, not the content but the way the portrait of the artist section in <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakdowns </span>is made is still interesting to me, so I’m trying to see what I can build with that. That thing of working in short spurts and putting them together later, so that each chunk can be drawn differently and have a different take on something connected to a larger whole.<br /><br />I’m also working on <span style="font-style: italic;">Meta-Maus</span> which is the Criterion DVD extra disc of <span style="font-style: italic;">Maus</span>, before I finally put all this stuff away — the sketches, transcripts, etc.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: Is that actually going to be a DVD?</span><br /><br />A: Well there was something <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Survivors-Macintosh-CD-Rom-Version/dp/1559404531">that came out back in the day</a>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: I have a copy of that.</span><br /><br />A: You can’t play it anymore, right?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Q: No, I don’t have HyperCard anymore.</span><br /><br />A: Nobody does and I’m trying to figure out how to — I can’t reconstruct it, it would be too much. I was hoping and some tech people in Vancouver are trying to figure out how to at least make it in its own primitive way functional by mounting the files onto Flash. That would become the disc that would be associated with the book version that would be something similar, like there’s a long interview that will run through as text and then the rough sketches, alternate drafts, notebook drawings that connect to it, historical photos. We’re going through all that stuff before I can finally pull it out of my studio and get new shelf space again. That’s the more selfish motive for it. It’s also so I’ll never have to explain why mice ever again. (laughs).<br /><br />So there’s that project in the works and then there’s another one which is an outgrowth of finding all these old comics online and looking at them again which is a big treasury of comics for kids. It’s well under way now. I don’t think it’s been publicly announced yet, but we’ll do it with Abrams.<br /><br />I think that should keep me busy for the next couple of years.Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-92142900301647621242008-10-21T13:34:00.003-04:002008-10-21T13:40:19.042-04:00Graphic Lit: Thoughts on the revamped For Better Or For Worse<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SP4T-baa4FI/AAAAAAAAAsM/J2U7wgw6xxA/s1600-h/PattersonFamily2006.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SP4T-baa4FI/AAAAAAAAAsM/J2U7wgw6xxA/s320/PattersonFamily2006.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5259663378046705746" border="0" /></a><br />What’s my favorite comic strip?<br /> <br />There was a time not long ago when my answer would have been Lynn Johnston’s family saga, <a href="http://www.fborfw.com/strip_fix/">“For Better or For Worse.” </a><br /> <br />Oh, “Peanuts” was always seminal for me, and “Calvin and Hobbes” was certainly the last great strip of the 20th century. But after Schulz’s death and Watterson’s retirement, Johnston stood head and shoulders above the comics page as the last bastion of quality.<br /> <br />That’s not the case now, and it hasn’t been for some time. Johnston’s constant need for overly cute wordplay, not to mention her forcing middle child Elizabeth into a marriage with creepy former sweetheart Anthony, left a bad taste in my mouth.<br /> <br />Of course, if you’ve been paying attention to the funnies at all, you noticed that “For Better or For Worse” came to a close of sorts recently.<br /> <br />After a yearlong series of “will-she/won’t-she” announcements, reversals and decisions, Johnston opted to bring the current story line to an end and has been redrawing and editing older strips, telling the Patterson family’s story all over again.<br /> <br />As creative choices go this seems a bit like regressive second-guessing to me. Revisiting and altering your older work doesn’t necessarily “fix” or “improve” anything, as most “Star Wars” fans would be quick to point out.<br /> <br />And yet, despite all my qualms, it’s worth pointing out just how good the strip has been over its 30-year run. One of the few strips to have its characters age in real time (“Gasoline Alley” being the other notable example), “For Better” offered an honest portrait of day-to-day family life that drew upon universal themes without sacrificing humor in the name of drama. Or vice-versa.<br /> <br />Johnston frequently explored risky or serious topics, the most famous no doubt being Michael’s best friend’s coming out of the closet. But she also addressed spousal abuse, bad love affairs, teen angst and the pitfalls of raising kids, often with insight and great characterization. She seemed to take an impish delight in walking right up to the line but not crossing it, and that delighted me.<br /><br />But what impressed me most about the strip was its lovely art and attention to detail. In an era when most cartoonists responded to the ever-shrinking news space by minimizing as much as possible (see “Dilbert”), Johnston grew more ornate and detailed.<br /> <br />Her strip frequently became a thinly sliced series of panels, each crammed to the point of overflowing with words and pictures, but never seeming dense or weighed down.<br /> <br />Yes, she could be sappy and saccharin. Yes, her constant need to add a “rim shot” fourth panel often resulted in terrible puns or awful homespun wisdom that wouldn’t make it onto a sub-par throw pillow. Detractors will get no argument from me on that score.<br /> <br />And there are plenty of detractors to go around. In recent years, Web sites like <a href="http://joshreads.com/">The Comics Curmudgeon</a> have made a veritable career out of poking fun at the strip. There are blogs devoted to “The Foobs” that delight in raking its characters over the coals as often as possible.<br /> <br />Why such ire over a simple comic strip?<br /> <br />Perhaps they sense how good it once was and could still be. Perhaps such snark was born out of frustration over seeing the characters they watched grow up be contorted into awkward and unrealistic relationships for the sake of a pat happy ending. Maybe they just didn’t like the strip.<br /> <br />Despite the awkward note “FBoFW” ended on, and however iffy I feel about this new 2.0 version, I’m grateful to Johnston for 30 years of raising the standards of the comics page (one of the few women to do so, it should be noted). She remains one of the greats.Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-58696376889915255442008-10-15T15:17:00.002-04:002008-10-15T15:25:23.660-04:00VG review: Lego Batman<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SPZDg88hmnI/AAAAAAAAAsE/Hte7BH5jsvw/s1600-h/517zan%2Bv3eL._SS400_.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SPZDg88hmnI/AAAAAAAAAsE/Hte7BH5jsvw/s320/517zan%2Bv3eL._SS400_.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5257463848396495474" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="http://legobatmangame.com/"><span style="font-weight: bold;">“LEGO BATMAN”</span></a> <span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />Warner Brothers, for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, Wii and PC rated E10+ for ages 10 and up (cartoon violence), $49.99 or $29.99 (PC and PS2).</span><br /><br />The developer Traveler’s Tales has obtained a license to print money recently with its “Lego Star Wars” and “Lego Indiana Jones” series of games.<br /> <br />As the titles suggests, the formula is simple: Take a beloved franchise and set it within the Lego universe, blocks and all.<br /> <br />Now it’s attempted to do the same thing with Batman and his cast of Gotham City characters. Overall it’s a fun family game, though some irksome problems appear frequently.<br /> <br />Unlike past Lego games, the story here is original and not based off any movies, though they keep it as simple as possible. To wit, all of Batman’s villains, from the Joker on down, have escaped prison and are on the loose. It’s up to Batman and Robin to put them back behind bars.<br /> <br />The combat is of the button-mashing variety, with little in the way of nuance. The good news is that just about everything in the game can explode in a shower of blocks, from bad guys to park benches. It’s fun to explode everything, but the battles do get repetitive after a few levels.<br /> <br />More problematic though is the level design, which wavers between clever and annoyingly frustrating. Too many times I found myself stuck, unable to figure out what to do next and forced to either seek help online or start over again. Hiding puzzles in plain sight is not good level design. It shows a lack of imagination and leads to irate gamers.<br /> <br />“Lego Batman” is designed for co-op play, and when you’re defeating the Joker with friends or family, the game is a blast. Playing alone, however, is a different matter, as the computer A.I. is staggeringly dense at times, leaving you to do most of the heavy lifting.<br /> <br />Overall, “Lego Batman” has charm and fun to spare, despite its various problems. It’s kid-friendly enough to play with your children and packed with enough extras and surprises to keep you playing despite the occasional hang-up. But it’s definitely one of those games that improves once you have someone to play with.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SPZDg7dyOCI/AAAAAAAAAr8/yplN7zDLQGo/s1600-h/51avcjyy7yL._SS400_.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SPZDg7dyOCI/AAAAAAAAAr8/yplN7zDLQGo/s320/51avcjyy7yL._SS400_.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5257463847999125538" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008</span></span>Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-28357701065739694912008-10-14T15:22:00.003-04:002008-10-14T15:33:04.597-04:00Graphic Lit: Manga for adults<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SPTzyoL6oeI/AAAAAAAAAr0/crOicy_Jl5A/s1600-h/Diary_front_cover.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SPTzyoL6oeI/AAAAAAAAAr0/crOicy_Jl5A/s320/Diary_front_cover.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5257094716154618338" border="0" /></a><br />Glancing at the manga shelves in the local book store, it’s easy to assume that this art form caters exclusively to teens and kiddies.<br /> <br />That would be a mistaken assumption. While the popular stuff does set its sights on the under-18 crowd, there are plenty of high-quality manga available in English that adults can pick up and read with impunity.<br /> <br />For example:<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">“Me and the Devil Blues: The Unreal Life of Robert Johnson”<br />by Akira Hiramoto, Del Rey, 544 pages, $19.95.</span><br /> <br />About as far from a traditional biography as you can get, Hiramoto’s fictional account of the famous bluesman (who, legend states, sold his soul to the devil in order to be able to play guitar), is more of a phantasmagorical rumination on early 20th century America than anything else.<br /> <br />Thus, we see sharecropper-turned-musician “RJ” meeting up with legendary figures like Clyde Barrow, running into “dry” Southern towns where drinking liquor can get you killed, and literally growing an extra set of fingers on his hand.<br /> <br />Coming from a vastly different culture, Hiramoto’s outsider approach works against him at times (his early attempts at comedy play a little too close to minstrelsy), but his approach to the material is fascinating. He’s also a wonderful storyteller, and the musical and action sequences have a vibrant and compelling potency. You don’t have to be a blues aficionado to appreciate this.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">“Disappearance Diary”<br />by Hideo Azuma, Fanfare/Ponent Mon, 200 pages, $22.99.</span><br /> <br />In 1989, the constant pressure of deadlines became too much for manga-ka Azuma, and he suffered a breakdown, running away from his home and family to live on the streets.<br /> <br />He eventually returned home, only to suffer another breakdown in 1992, this time abandoning his responsibilities to become a gas pipe-fitter. By 1998, his alcoholism became so bad that he was forced to check himself into a rehab clinic.<br /> <br />Azuma chronicles those experiences in “Disappearance Diary.” This is not a mordant, gloomy affair about a man confronting his darker nature, but rather one of the cheeriest stories about homelessness and despondency ever told.<br /> <br />Drawn in a cartoonish style, Azuma refuses to pay heed to despair, cracking jokes and looking on the bright side when possible.<br /> <br />Yet despite the book’s sunny disposition, there’s a melancholy dread at the center that’s impossible to ignore. It’s this constant “push-pull” between the facts of Azuma’s tale and the way he delineates it that makes “Diary” such an amazing book — certainly one of the best I’ve read this year.<br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">“Good-Bye”<br />by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Drawn &amp; Quarterly, 212 pages, $19.95.</span><br /> <br />This is the third and final volume of Tatsumi’s short stories that D&amp;Q is collecting (though they plan to publish his autobiography at a later date). As with the previous books, these are largely bleak, dour tales of people on the fringes of society. The obsessed, poor, and utterly depressed make up Tatsumi’s world.<br /> <br />“Good-Bye” might well be the best of the three volumes, mainly because in many of the stories Tatsumi connects his characters’ sufferings to larger social and political events, namely the American occupation of Japan and deep poverty the country dealt with after World War II.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008</span></span>Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16433278.post-21166524669351253122008-10-08T11:48:00.002-04:002008-10-08T11:51:15.505-04:00VG review: Rock Band 2<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SOzWzAM_u3I/AAAAAAAAArk/3s6fL1rxqsw/s1600-h/rb5.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SOzWzAM_u3I/AAAAAAAAArk/3s6fL1rxqsw/s320/rb5.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254811036950707058" border="0" /></a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.rockband.com/">“ROCK BAND 2”</a> <span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />Electronic Arts, for Xbox 360, rated T for Teen (lyrics, sugges­tive themes), $59.99 (for game), $89.99 (for drums), $69.99 (for guitar).</span><br /><br />“Rock Band 2” is the video game equivalent of a victory lap.<br /> <br />Having established the equation “Guitar Hero” + “more instruments” = “awesome game,” developers Harmonix do little to alter the basic formula this time around, merely finessing and tweaking the overall experience.<br /> <br />As before, you and up to three of your friends form a virtual band, playing with guitar and drum controllers as well as singing along to tunes like “American Woman” and “Pinball Wizard.”<br /> <br />The solo and group modes have been incorporated under the “World Tour” section this time around. What’s nice about that is that you can switch out band members on the fly, so you can progress with the same band regardless of whether you are playing by yourself or with a large group.<br /> <br />The Internet figures big this time around as you can world tour online and join other people’s bands. There’s also a “Battle of the Bands” feature where you can duke it out for musical supremacy via Xbox Live.<br /> <br />While those sections might appeal to the more expert player, there also are a number of features designed to help newcomers. The “Drum Trainer” for example, is designed to show you how to keep the beat (and might help you with real drums). The “No Fail” option, meanwhile, allows kids to play without fear of being booed off stage.<br /> <br />While “Rock Band 2” works well with the first game’s instruments (as well as the “Guitar Hero” ones), EA has made new guitars and drum kit. They’re nice, and much more responsive than the previous iteration, though not so wonderful that you’ll feel like you’re missing out if you stick with your original instruments.<br /> <br />There’s really not much in “Rock Band 2” to make it stand out from its predecessor. But with more than 80 songs and the ability to download more (plus incorporate your songs from the first game for a mere $5 licensing fee), fans will probably be too busy rocking out to complain.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SOzWzQEvZ-I/AAAAAAAAArs/tAsu5r-K4C8/s1600-h/rb24.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0V2HjILmsWY/SOzWzQEvZ-I/AAAAAAAAArs/tAsu5r-K4C8/s320/rb24.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254811041211049954" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Copyright The Patriot-News</span></span>Chris Mautnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403679880795552715noreply@blogger.com0